thechrisproject photography

Every year Madison hosts the Art Fair on the Square, a two day event with over 500 artists that is attended by around 200,000 people. At the same times is the Art Fair Off the Square, which is immediately adjacent and you wouldn’t even be able to tell was a different event unless you read about it. I had planned on going to check out the photography on Saturday at the recommendation of a coworker who mentioned a few photographers I should check out. Joachim Knill has an amazingly ginormous polaroid camera he developed himself.

So, I ended up busy a lot of the weekend. Saturday I was working on wedding shots, then shooting derby, then going to see Screamin’ Cyn Cyn and the Pons and Human Aftertaste. Interesting note about that later. Sunday I blanked on the fair until around 3 or 4. I got there at 4:15 with all of 45 minutes to check everything out. I decided to only hit photographers, which made my perusal task seem a little more sane. I also decided to just abandon the idea that I’d be able to look critically at everything. I was all about snap judgments.

I have to get this off my chest now: I’m not the biggest fan of art fairs. Rather, I’m not the biggest fan of all the art at art fairs. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather walk around a shitty art fair than attend a really good baseball game. The artists are usually fun to talk to, and even if I don’t like the stuff I’m seeing, I get to think about it and converse with people about it. The thing with art fairs is that a lot of the styles I see seem so homogeneous. Not completely so, no, but enough so that I’d remark about it.

• Every photographer’s booth I stopped at had an artist statement, and none of them shot digital. Luckily, they all seemed to be cool about it. I’ve been to a photographers booth at another fair where he had a proudly displayed “No Digital” sign up amongst his work. After we talked for a while he let on that one of his favorite parts of the whole process was matting and framemaking. He also revealed that his larger prints were, in fact, digitally printed.
• The subjects were dominated by landscapes, travel photography, and animals. Sometimes more than one. I mean, don’t get me wrong. These photographers are quite talented at what they do. Generally much more so than I am at what I do. I saw a number of photographers who make their own prints and are spectacular printmakers, and I told them so. But when I look at the website of the 2006 Best of Show - Photography winners Barbara & Ernest Abel, I get a little downtrodden. Perhaps it’s the dated looking web design, but maybe it’s because photographs of doors in other countries just don’t do it for me.

One thing that was slightly refreshing was seeing pictures with some real color. Vibrant, saturated color. I know that my enjoyment of the color probably seems contradictory to my indictments of the photography above, but I’m getting tired of the dull, muted colors I see in so much fine art photography on the web.

What is it about art fairs that bugs me? And can I say something here that’s not going to make me sound like an elitist pig? I certainly hope so, because I don’t think I am one. I really respect artists that can support themselves with art, and unless you’re in that 1/10th of a percent that gets catches the big money fine art wave, you’re going to have to do some serious work for a long time. Doing commercial work, doing work that has a wide appeal, and selling your work at as many places as possible is necessary to keep your art and life afloat. I’m guessing that a number of these photographers have some art that I’d really love to see, but isn’t out because it’s not the kind of art that will appeal to the majority of the 200,000 people that will pass it in two days. Now in examining that statement, I think we need to pay attention to the causality. Mass appeal does not cause something to be bad. Can something wildly popular be artistically rich? You bet. There are plenty of blockbuster movies, books, albums, and photographs that I absolutely love and think are wonderful works of art. Heck, my first two favorite photographers when I was young were Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz, in that order. They’re about as big as you can get as far as modern day popularity goes.

So where am I going with this? I think I have plenty of photographs that would fit right in at an art fair. These ones, for example:

I’d love to generate some more revenue from my photography. It’d certainly be nice to afford some equipment I’ve been pining for. I’d also like to know that people enjoy my work. But the idea of buying a big tent and carpeted walls to hang photos on, then to sit around for two days in the hot sun hoping to sell them really seems horrible to me. Then again, I’m an amateur with a day job while these artists are out there making and selling art for a living.  I would just like to see a little more daring and variation in the work they are doing.

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