“Being still and doing nothing,” Mr. Han tells Xiao Dre, “are two very different things.” If only martial artist and popular photo blogueur Jonathan Blaustein had been paying attention. The plural of “still life” is not “still lives,” as we read in JB's recent column* promoting photography festivals, “the life-blood of the photo world, here in the US” where he is often a reviewer. One still life … two still lifes … three still lifes ..., even when autocorrect screams for still lives and underlines in red the offending life in plural.**
As the pandemic recedes with the relaxation of social distancing and mask mandates, photo festivals are once again in person. “For some reason,” JB wonders, “there has always been push-back against the idea of ‘pay-to-play’” portfolio reviews, an important source of revenue for festival organizers, where the chance to spend 20 minutes with a photo industry gatekeeper costs roughly half the fee of a competent mouthpiece or about $250 per hour plus travel expenses. You cannot not afford it. Like psychosocial therapy, photo festivals “are the types of experiences we all need, to rebuild our psyches, our creativity, and our sense of self….” A therapeutic portfolio review offers “tremendous rewards,” is “about finding value,” and “literally builds new neural pathways in your brain,” JB assures us. One of the benefits of this metaphorical lobotomy is the discovery of exciting art by artists heretofore unknown to him.
Suddenly JB veers from promotion to critique. At the 2019 Photolucida festival, JB discovered Small Talk, a collective of four women supporting each other, as the they say on their website, “as individual artists, as well as photographers who identify as womxn, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC, by sharing resources and creating exhibition and publication opportunities.” In June 2021, the collective sent JB “a slim publication to publicize a new venture”; nine months later JB pulled the “very simple ‘zine, called ‘Reverberations: Vol.1’” from his “book stack” for review. Given that zine is no longer short for magazine and has assumed its role as an independent signifier, JB’s use of the apostrophe is nostalgic. With a condescending wink, he notes that the collective’s zine “reads more like a promotional piece, than a proper art object in its own right, but so what?”
So what? Is JB accusing the collective of hawking PR disguised as art? Or is he basing his slight on their announcement that the zine was sent out for promotional purposes? Perhaps JB forgot his previous column, where he recommends “making a book as an ‘art project,’ one that also functions as a high-end marketing tool” allowing “an audience to see what you’ve accomplished exactly as you’d like them to.” Good advice. Still, JB’s distinction between tchotchke and and objet d’art smacks of the uncanny when we contemplate photography’s surrealist dalliances and vernacular destiny. Not to worry. The aesthetic goal is parenthetical. “(Not everything can nail the gestalt effect, where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.)” Aristotle is never around when you need him. JB explains, “Partly, it’s because the writing skews towards artist statement, rather than audience engagement, and because the two included projects are not an obvious fit.”
Artist statements written in academic doublespeak may indeed alienate viewers, but JB provides no examples of the skewed prose, nor does he explain why the zine’s two projects do not fit together obviously. “They compliment each other with color palette, and overall image quality,” he tells us, “but Kelda Van Patten makes IRL/digital collage work, from still lives, and Marilyn Montufar documented local culture in the hinterlands of Northern Mexico.” There’s that lively plural, and why zine together cyborg collage with local documentary? What subtle connections may we draw from the subjective artifice of a still life with the emotive objectivity of a photographic portrait? JB doesn’t ask.
Still, all is not lost. JB likes the zine, “which means I also now have a positive impression of the Small Talk Collective, whereas yesterday” he was oblivious to the group and their “holistic object.” Yay! The earth womxn get the nod! As well they should; their zine is “a sleek, cool little offering” in its little black cover adorned with multicolored letters. JB “can imagine the Small Talk Collective members ... patiently folding the 4-printed-pages together” like ladies at a quilting bee. Now that he knows “who these artists are,” JB can patronize, sexualize, and promote them while promoting himself. Very “few seemed to grasp the embedded advice” he says, embedding a link to his column about making photobooks, “that a professional-looking publication can impress, on next-to-no money.” The Small Talk collective’s zine is a “perfect example of” JB’s counsel.
* This commentary began as remarks I submitted to aphotoeditor.com’s comments section. The site administrators moderate, i.e., censor, comments, no doubt to protect themselves and their readers from violent vulgarity that dominates so much of social media. The moderators chose not to post my comments.
** Eventually, of course, the language will evolve: still lives will become the plural for what French art historians call nature morte, dead nature. Unlike other lexical evolutions, the disappearance of still lifes will be due to autocorrect, a infantile form of artificial intelligence, and not to the vernacular where, for example, whom is giving way to who, now both subject and object in both spoken and written languages. But we’re not there yet. Still lives still describes the quiet, and the dead.