Photographer Magazine (2001)
From the time I started engaging with photography and thus demonstrably expressed my love and respect for it, I felt the need to defend it. This quixotic act of chivalry might be deemed useless or even prove fruitless. After all, if an art cannot defend itself, what use is it to have self-appointed champions? Nonetheless, I engaged (and continue to engage) in its defense in two main ways. The first, which is the easiest and most effective, is the education of external admirers. That is, creating conscious viewers and possibly cultivated photographers. The second and infinitely more difficult task is protecting it from the excesses and deviations of its internal servants, namely the photographers themselves.
The great threat to photography has always been, and still is, the flip side of its main advantage: its ease of use. In the last twenty to thirty years, another threat has emerged: its recognition (and even more so, its embrace) by the highly commercial and media-dominated world of visual arts, elevating it to a quintessential fashion activity. To use the jargon, photography has become (unfortunately) part of the prevailing lifestyle.
I used to denounce (though they are few) professional photographers who had taken a metaphorical 'stone' from Art and who, unsatisfied even by the meticulous and significant results of professional work, sought vindication through either conscious or unconscious entanglement of their work with artistic creation. Over time, such photographers have come to seem not only harmless to photography but also quite endearing through their understandable insecurity.
Today, the perverted tendencies of contemporary photographic behavior are mainly incubated among the population of (young) artist photographers, making the conscientious efforts of professional photographers and their artistic attempts appear as innocent games compared to the seasoned strategies of the new trained artists.
The general impression that I keep recording in my mind, painfully repeated, which a few notable exceptions are not sufficient to overturn or even relieve, is that for most young photographers, the very world of visual arts has become their raison d'être. The beautiful and uncertain journey of artistic creation, with its even more uncertain destination, no longer moves them as much as the social certainty of a degree, the financial security provided by creating a robust personal image, and the recognition (albeit brief) granted by media exposure. All this in the shortest possible journey, with the assurance that their presence is not supported by any past nor looks forward to any future.
How can one mildly reproach these young ones when artistic institutions of well-known collectors demand as entry conditions for competitions the presentation of a Fine Arts School degree?
How can you justify that the famous and significant photo 'Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare' by the French Henri Cartier-Bresson was sold at a recent auction for 2,000,000 drachmas, when the very well-known roses by the American Edward Steichen and an (unknown) photo by the talented photographer (American) Francesca Woodman (who, however, committed suicide at the age of 23) sold for respectively 75,000,000 and 25,000,000 drachmas (and the parentheses here have their reason).
How can you explain to them amidst the general frenzy of accumulating postgraduate titles, that artistic creation and doctoral dissertations are by their nature contradictory and mutually exclusive concepts? That the former is defined by the individual and extends indefinitely, while the latter must disregard the individual and extend only to a specific depth.
How can you wound them by conveying your surprise and despair that what they feel as avant-garde is but the most suffocating manifestation of the appropriation of art by the laws of the market, conservation, politics, media, and the powerful general Convention.
While the fate of artistic photography lies in the hands of university institutions, complex professors, covert or overt commercial enterprises, semi-educated art critics, and ignorant collectors, and while the values of young artists differ little from those of young business executives, all I can wish for my dearly loved young artist photographers is, after they have gathered as many degrees as they can, after they have knocked on as many gallery doors and art dealers (truly, what a nightmarish term!) as they can, after they have pinned down as many excerpts written about them in albums, to pick up their cameras and 'play' with photography, since we are nothing but players and at the same time pawns in the great game whose rules we are unaware of. For (paraphrasing Van Gogh a bit) 'life is so short and moves so quickly, that, if you are a photographer, you must photograph.”Everything else confuses us.
Plato Rivellis