For those taking photographs in France and Italy

Don’t.

Have been in a tony southwestern suburb of Chicago being greeted by cicadas and heat. I was there to be a judge at their summer art fair that was being held in the main park downtown. Arrived early to wander the place and make snaps before taking up my duties. Typical suburb, Starbucks, Einstein’s Bagels, gap, an Ace hardware camouflaged as a village general shop…

Was doing it for the first time trying to build up my funds for the tab at the duke within a fortnight’s time with the plummeting Yankee dollar I had to take on odd jobs if I am to keep to the standard that I am used to.

Was handed a clipboard and my assignments, I was to judge photography, sculpture, and mixed media. It was a numeric system I was to assign a number between one and seven to the work seen and if I wanted give comments.

There was the NYC artist wannabe as she rattled off as soon as we were to set out how she had to race through this for she was off to… then had a show in … then ….

At first I was going to go to the booths in the order than they were lined up then assess the work. I found, however, that it was too confusing going from one media to another when I was trying to compare like and even harder to assess numbers when I hadn’t seen all of the work.

Thinking it would be more interesting, did mixed media first. Well there is mixed media and there was mixed miedia. Being of the pedigree of the WGAS, I was expecting this category to be those works that used different media equally – photobased sculpture say.

It was mixed media was printmaking for the most part with a bit of handmade paper. Printmaking here was inkjet prints imitating a more traditional method

- am glad to give up the acids, lead and respirator and get the same look.

In this category though were collages. But also woody sculptural thingies – which were also found in sculpture

The categories were bothersome not in the way of the WGAS but in the way that booths had to fit somewhere. When I finally finished mixed media and was on to something more rational – sculpture – there was the same problem as it contained – jewellery – but not all was included, a lot of wood boxed, hand made furniture, stained glass and lawn ornaments made from tasteful junque.

As painful as this was it was at least for me illuminating – I think that the clichés that one doesn’t see is less objectionable – so I could take the barns, the seascapes, the clouds and enough flowers to bring on my hay fever.

Heading into photography – I could see how envious fibroids that seem always to be making snaps could hate photoids and everything photographic.

If I never see another photograph of France and Italy I will be quite happy, the work was so similar that I wasn’t sure if I had been in the booth before or not. All had the orange façaded bistro with flowers in the window and a leaning old bicycle. For italy it was houses on a hill, a narrow street and knowing a successful formula they would be repeated with minor variations in all the towns visited. It seemed always to be the south of France, and never in a city of any size – although some Eiffel Towers were slipped in.

It seems that with colour the super white façades of Greece that were so popular when everything was black and white, have lost favour

There was the Asian variation with photographs mimicking Chinese paintings – mountains, water and mist.

There were exceptions but those were placing their images on canvas and stretching it so that it was now a bad painting – should it be in mixed media?

There was one nude booth with work so stereotypical that I would have left if the photographer hadn’t corralled me.

- this was to be black and white but it was muddy. Black and white doesn’t work in the studio.

Buddy here seemed to have imitated the worse of Uelsman, and Brandt and realised that full frontal was fine as long as the model was in a lotus position on some slick rock.

Only one person photographed the world around him. All wanted to talk about – not with me – with other photographers – technique

- I use/don’t use digital because…


The astounding aspect of both mixed media and photography was the editioning. The average was an edition of 350 there were as high as 950 – not 1000 but 950. So far all the numbers were in the low two digit range.

- how can this Polaroid emulsion lift have an edition of 350?
- Oh I just print more.