by Ed Marszewski and Aron Gent Rod Slemmons is the Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. He’s had a very distinguished career as a museum professional, teacher, curator, writer, editor and printmaker. From 1982 to 1996 he started and built the photography collection at the Seattle Art Museum. In the early 90’s Rod chaired the Society for Photographic Education. He’s produced scores of exhibitions and he teaches at both Columbia College and the graduate program at the Art Institute of Chicago. As the Director of one of the most important contemporary photography institutions in the US, we find his experiences and opinions invaluable guides for working artists, professionals and anyone interested in photography. [caption id="attachment_2640" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image courtesy of Joseph Rynkiewicz"][/caption] Ed Marszewski: What turned you on to photography? Rod Slemmons: It was really active, rather than passive. My first two degrees are in literature and writing, so I started teaching both at a place called Western Washington State University in the early 70s. Long story short, I found out that if my students were given a Shakespeare sonnet, they had problems. But if I showed them a movie or a photograph, they knew lots of things about structure and analysis and how to look at it. So I kept saying, "You guys have this in your brains, how come you can't use it?" And so there was a funny little historical museum in Bellingham. It had this collection of photographs made by one professional shooter named Wilber Sandison. The students didn't know the actual purposes for the pictures, but they could look at the prints and make up explanations, which they were afraid to do with Shakespeare. So I just started using the Sandison pictures for discussion when the students would get frozen up with literature. I did that for four years.A sign by Interstate 90 that said, "Will the last person leaving Seattle please shut off the lights?” Workers were leaving, engineers were leaving, and the economy took a dive. So they fired everybody that didn't have tenure in the entire state university system, which included me. I had applied for a grant to preserve the collection of photographs at the local museum, and I ran down there and said, "If you get the grant, don't hire anybody, I'll do it!” I didn't know anything about photography, I mean, the technical part. They said, "Well, we got the grant, Rod, you're hired!" That summer I taught myself how to print—I learned a lot more later—then I printed 4,000 negatives, mainly 8x10 contacts, some smaller, and just worked my ass off. That fall, they hired me back at the college to teach photography, which I had just taught myself. (Well, that is not exactly true. There was an older guy at the museum, a photographer named Galen Biery who taught me a lot of professional tricks.) EM: I think it’s pretty amazing that you created your own collection at the Seattle Art Museum. How would someone even go about that? RS: You are skipping ahead. After Bellingham, I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology and was a graduate intern at the George Eastman House. When I was at GEH, there was this big debate between art and document. Everybody was trying to divide things up between art and document. And it occurred to me that that was a false dichotomy. So when I started collecting photos for the Seattle Art Museum (I was hired as Curator of Photography there in 1982, after Rochester) I actually tried to collect to support that dialectic, but also, in a way, so I could put the pictures up on the wall and they could duke it out, not the art historians. So I collected really good documentary work and I collected really good contemporary art-work and then I would put them together. We did a museum publication on that, The Truth and the Facts. I had other ideas, but what inspired me to elaborate on that particular one was that when I explained it to Virginia Wright, a major patron of the Seattle Art Museum, she liked the idea of conscious collecting toward a theory or an idea rather than just a random survey of the medium. And she was supportive, which is very important with patrons. She said this great thing at the time: "It's better to be clearly wrong than vaguely right." EM: Hah, that's really good. That's totally unusual, that's like a dream patron. RS: She was the perfect patron, really smart. You don't get them very often. But anyway, I collected to that end for a while. Then another body of work presented itself that wasn't that dissimilar. We got a bunch of Edward Sheriff Curtis work. He photographed Native Americans between 1899 and the late 1920s. He's a famous guy who did a huge project called The North American Indian. I'd been working for several Indian tribes in the Northwest, helping them establish museums about themselves, and I had a bunch of photographs that Indians had taken of themselves at that same time that Curtis was working, and then I had his photographs that a couple of other patrons had given us, primarily John Hauberg. So, on the one hand you see this pictorialist fictionalizing of Indian culture, and then you see the Indians looking at themselves. I put that together in a big show that traveled for a long time. Twelve years. So those were two major projects I did at the Seattle Art museum. The third big one was the first retrospective of Lee Friedlander, with the book Like a One-eyed Cat. I have Lee to thank for that one. EM: Do you have a group of peers who were trying to figure out the Art vs. Document issue? Or were people pissed off at you? RS: Well, some got upset at me because it's easier to teach when you have categories. You can say “This is art,” or “This is document." And be done with it. Whereas anyone who's worked as a professional photographer knows that if you're a journalistic photographer, you better damn well know what the tricks are that the artists are using, because those are the tricks that work when selling the news. So you use art tricks to do documentary, and vice-versa. You know, the artists during the 1930s were all looking at the Farm Security Administration photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans because they were inventing documentary tricks to communicate ideas about culture. You can use those same tricks to communicate in the realm of art. EM: Today I find myself admiring advertising photography, commercial photography, because it's surreal and beautiful. RS: Yeah, I always tell my students they should watch the Super Bowl because those ads are the most interesting of the year, and also they always reference art that's going on in New York and elsewhere. EM: You once wrote, “Like a painter with a blank canvas and a writer with a blank sheet, the photographer starts with an invisible idea and collects visual facts to support it." I bring that up because it challenges Albert Stabler’s condemnation of photography as an art form. You brought up how during the depression, when artists were imitating Dorothea Lange’s documentary style, other people were actually creating it as a kind of aesthetic style. Was there any discussion about photography as an artform then? Did people actually consider it fine art at that time? Their intentions were to be propagandists for the government, right? But it inadvertently or consciously became the most well-known art-photography in American history. RS: At that time? Well, yeah. [Walker Evans] had been to Europe, he'd seen surrealism, he'd seen what was going on art-wise in Europe. Dorothea Lange was very, very familiar with art in general and had been trained by Pictorialist photographers, like Clarence White, who definitely thought of themselves as artists, and were even trained by Alfred Steiglitz to think that way. The famous picture of the migrant mother is a direct copy of a Kathe Kolwitz print done toward the end of the First World War to acknowledge the plight of the refugees. It's a mother holding some little kids with her hand up to her face. I think Dorothea Lange knew about using art tricks from looking at artists like Kathe Kolwitz do documentary imagery. My problem with the art-document thing is that there's another whole area of endeavors that's purely decorative. Pictures of Yosemite, nicely printed in an 8x10 frame; you know, works that are not very interesting at all. And people get confusing when they call that "fine art" photography. I’m not quite sure what the hell they're talking about. It's like pictures of fake nature. They are pictures of little tiny parts of the world that have been cordoned off and been made into nature and then the rest of it is clear cut logged, or mined, or whatever. So, I don't know what it's telling us. Is it telling us that we're being duped? That might fall into effectively into the Art category. EM: The thing is, though, to most people, that is fine art, right? RS: Yeah, but it's just decorative, you can put it in a hotel room and it looks great. Everybody can obviously have their own ideas about this. What I'm saying is, for me, once you've said, “Don't the shapes fit nicely together and aren’t the tonalities wonderful?” What else do you say? EM: Well, what are you looking for when work is being submitted at the MOCP or when you're curating an exhibition? Does the craft have to be at a specific level or not? RS: I run into trouble with my colleagues here. I lived in a darkroom for twenty years, you know, moonlighting as a professional photographer while I was teaching and curating. I know about photographic craft. If the craft contributes to the metaphor, or whatever it is you're trying to do with the picture, that's fine. That's great. William Blake said this great thing about how he makes art in the corrosive method to eat away at received wisdom. And what he's referring to is that he's an etcher, he uses acid to etch into the copper plate to make the image. But he's using the word "corrosive" in another sense, so that he can eat away at cultural ideas that people assume are correct. That is what I am talking about: the medium becoming a supportive metaphor for the message. When people like Paul Berger use the computer, they don't have full control over what comes out, you know? Or when they use their memory, where they don't have full control either. So if you can use a system to communicate an idea, that's when I like to talk about craft. I think that's the good part about craft. But if you just say, well this is a beautifully made black and white gelatin-silver print, does that really matter? We have some great pictures here in the museum by Marina Abramavic, the performance artist. You know, the oversaturated pictures? I have to tell you that when I first got here from Seattle, six years ago, I was at a meeting and we were looking at a bunch of pictures and one of those Abramavic pictures came up and somebody who shall remain nameless said, "It's a really interesting picture, but it's a bad photograph." That seems to me like a misuse of criteria of judgment. EM: People get caught up in this technical kind of shit? It's really easy for them to get stuck there 'cause often times when we have conversations with friends and photographers, they demean the documentary style, the commercial style of photography. I often argue that some of the best photography is a blend of all these things. All of the photographers that are interesting are using all these techniques and forms … Aron Gent: You'll argue that there's a difference between so-called "fine art," "contemporary photography," and the commercial stuff. I wonder why it's important to have these divisions. Is it because of people's needs to stay within specific genres or institutionalized roles? RS: It's way more difficult to figure out a picture's relationship to culture and to life than it is to say that it's wonderfully printed. And, yes, it partly results from institutional needs to categorize. EM: Maybe people don't want to invest the energy into appreciating the idea. RS: Yeah, it's more difficult to sort out the relationship between a photograph and the objects in front of the camera than it is to say, "You need to use a 4x5 instead of a 2x4." EM: And also sometimes a person's emotional response triggers something in you, something you can't discuss. RS: But still, I argue that if the emotional response leads you someplace interesting, that's fine. If the emotional response just makes you go "Whoa, I love the shapes and they make me feel good," and then--well what else? So, that's just me. But if you read Dave Hickey, he'll argue for the other side. He’ll say that the aesthetics are way out of proportion with the idea and that the aesthetics need to be delved into and respected. EM: Well, let's do a concrete study in how you might put together a show. AG: For example, when choosing the photographers featured in this issue’s portfolio, we were overcome by deciding who to pick. We usually pick artists we know, and we know the people who are around us. So we tried to go outside of that by having other people select photographers to broaden our horizons. How do you choose exhibitions? Do you come up with an idea and then you search for photographers? RS: Generally, that’s how we do it. It's thematic. You start with a theme and you try to fit the other stuff in—I mean the exploration of what photography can or can’t do. And sometimes you get thrown off the theme in the process of looking for people. I designed a show here, four or five years ago, called Painting on Photography/Photography on Painting. At first I came up with a bunch of people working in those media. Then Tash and Karen looked at it and they said "Ah no you're forgetting this or forgetting that." So I changed my idea a little bit, and then all three of us did it together. So, there were situations where the paintings were made from photographs, there were situations where the object was made by painting on a photograph, and so on. I mean, there were a lot of different combinations and variations on that theme. That ended up expanding out into something really interesting where were exploring what people mean when they say "mixed media” And we got very interested in what photography brings to the mix. So that would be an example of a theme that enlarged itself. We're doing a book on that: photography and audio, photography and video, photography and performance, photography and text, photography and painting. Does photography become schizophrenic when mixing? What’s going on? That's a really honest question that is better explored, perhaps, in an exhibition rather than a book of theory. [caption id="attachment_2641" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Image courtesy of Joseph Rynkiewicz"][/caption] I'm more interested in photographers who present questions. They say “What if?” or “Why?” rather than “No, this is the way it is.” There's no question in a picture of Yosemite, unless you're a geologist and saying “Whoa, how the hell did that happen?” But there are lots of questions in contemporary cutting-edge photography. Why is it that photography can be used for this but not for that? Why is it that it's really difficult to put text and an image together, that usually one of them throws the other out of the ring? We did a show on that here at MOCP also, and I argued that there's not just two things. It's not just text and image. When you read a text, an image pops up in your brain. And when you see an image, a word pops up in your brain. So that's four things. It's like watching a wrestling match with four wrestlers. In answer to Aron's questions, we find people who are either dancing around the idea like wolves going around sheep or people who are asking questions. EM: I also like that you are not necessarily focused on just being a centerpiece for local photography, right? MOCP is truly an international institution in a sense. RS: Well, our current MOCP MP3 show is chosen from people working in the local six states. But it's not conceived in the sense that there's a regional photography. There are great photographers working here that could be anywhere. EM: But do you believe in that kind of concept— of a regionalism? RS: No. I lived in the Pacific Northwest too long to believe in regionalism. There, it is a kind of religion. EM: I remember we came here once, talking about this notion of Chicagraphy that Brian Ulrich and a bunch of students (at that time) were toying with: a kind of branding thing to promote Chicago artists. I like the notion of it being a marketable term to kind of challenge how you pay attention to any art anywhere. I thought that was fun. But I remember one of your colleagues said that we don't just want to talk about local stuff, that's not our game here. We're not just about Chicago. RS: Our main charge—our mission, actually—is to bring work in from the outside. That's what we need to do. But you'll notice that we show a lot of Chicago people in the context of work from elsewhere. EM: Well, yeah, let's face it, Chicago-trained artists are some of the best in the world. RS: It's the third biggest city in the country, right? AG: So how do you choose a) these people from Chicago to promote and b) these artists that you bring in from the outside? I think that what the Museum of Contemporary Photography does well is bringing in amazing photographs by these very famous photographers, but you also promote and get younger people out there. RS: Starting at the sort of top level, you can use the model of the Whitney Biennial and Francesco Bonami. The Whitney is trying to get this one guy to come up with a group of artists who will tell us something about art production today, or why we need art today or whatever, but it'll be only his idea. Look at what he did in the Venice Biennial. He had a real specific idea of what he wanted to do. The biggest pavilion had Richard Prince in it, and then you went out from there. So, it was about appropriation writ large and it was one brilliant person doing it, so you can only blame him if it goes bad. And he was obviously pulling people from over the whole world, not just from Chicago. But on the other end of the spectrum, you could actually come up with a theme. And what I find weird is that we go out and do these portfolio reviews every year for a variety of places, in Santa Fe and Portland, a couple weeks ago I was over in Madrid doing it, and all of a sudden, after you do three or four of them, you start to notice themes. You start to notice these things that are being done everywhere and not necessarily cognizant of each other. A couple of years ago, it was piles of gravel. I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. I go and do this exhibition jury in Wichita, KS, where there'd be two or three piles of gravel and people photographing piles of gravel. Where the hell did they come up with that? I mean, that's a real simple one, but over the years I can think of others, like, broken-down old hospitals. Prisons. There were tons of people doing that for a couple years. On a much wider look at things, there's the whole Rineke Dijskstra portrait thing. A person standing there looking straight at you. I saw one of her very first shows and everybody was saying, “This is like the Bechers, except with people.” It was kind of interesting at the time, for me, but then everybody did it over and over. There's a whole huge thing in Portland called PhotoLucida, where they send those of us who are jurors CDs with 2000 pictures on them and you have to go through everything. Interestingly, the people that are really hip, the people producing interesting art using photography, put stuff in each one of these juried reviews. So then, by this peculiar method, you actually keep seeing them over and over again and you start to get more interested in what they are up to. I guess I mean to say that it isn’t all superficial snap decisions about liking this or that. EM: So, let’s talk about the schools and instructors. What areas in the world are great for people making photography? RS: Well, UCLA currently has the largest batch of very interesting people teaching there. The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) has some very, very good people. Interestingly, there are some very good young people at the University of New Mexico. That place was really hot maybe twenty years ago, when Tom Barrow was there and Van Coke and other people. So these things kind of come and go in sine curves. There’s also Cal Arts, which has a long reputation. And there is UC Riverside--there are some good people teaching there. EM: Well, what about Yale? RS: Yale's had the same good people teaching there for a long time. EM: But isn't that like a holy grail to be accepted to grad school at Yale? Isn’t it one of the places that becomes a good signifier? RS: Well, yeah, there have been some very good people teaching there, as I say, but for a long time. It depends on who's in charge of the place where you're trying to get a job teaching or working as an artist. If they're older and more traditional, they'll say, “Well, if you don't come from Yale or UCLA or RISD, you're going to have to go find a job someplace else." EM: Yeah, but those days are ending, right? RS: I would think so. There are a lot of good teachers across the whole country now. EM: I'm glad that you're not such a self-promoting person as I am, I mean, you didn't throw Columbia in there, on your top list. RS: [laughs] Columbia has a very good photo program. There also have four really good, new, young teachers and I’m anxious to see what they're going to do. Two of them I know pretty well and I know they're going to turn out very good students. EM: One of the most important things I've learned through working on whatever festival stuff I do is that there's typically a few key instructors who train and turn out an entire generation of awesome kids. And I don’t think people realize that really good instructors are what make a difference in how kids can go forward, you know? RS: I always gauge good instructors based on how dissimilar their work looks to their students’. Over the years, I have observed photographers that have had their students make contact sheets (or the digital equivalent), then put check marks by the ones that look like their work and say, “Print these.” But that's kind of an old school thing. There's a bump and when you get over that and understand what the student is up to in their own terms and encourage them to do their own thing—that strikes me as being a really good teacher. Tom Barrow was one like that. His own work wasn't all that great, you know, but he was really good at making people find out what they wanted to do. Bill Jenkins is another one. Paul Burger, who I taught with at the University of Washington, was another one. None of his students made stuff that looked like his at all, in fact, they didn't even like his work too much. They'd say, "Well, why are you doing that?" I think that's kind of important. That's the best answer I can give you to your Yale question. And, as I said, the fact is that schools run up and down on a sine curve. They shouldn’t be thought of as church. AG: Do you see much of a difference between a professional photographer and an amateur photographer in the context of contemporary arts? I mean also in the context of Flicker and Facebook. Because definitely and ideally they can brush on the same thing but not with the technical quality of a professional photographer. RS: I think that the amateurs, as you have distinguished them from the professional, have a better chance of getting to some interesting ideas. My wife is a jeweler, as you know, and people are always asking her, “Why don't you use precious materials?” and she says, "There's nothing more precious than an idea." So she's using ideas, and expressing them in any material that fits. In a way, she is striving to preserve an amateur point of view to protect the possibility of uninfluenced ideas. A professional photographer can make a great formal picture that's pleasing to look at and whatever, but if it doesn't have any ideas connected to it, then there's no way for that person to feel superior to somebody messing around with imagery on Flickr. As far as the amateur-professional thing, those are really old arguments. I mean, if you read Alfred Stieglitz in 1908 and 1910, he argues that you can't be a real artist unless you're an amateur. You know, if you're a professional, then you've been somehow cleansed of the possibility of making a picture that's going to move somebody, which is kind of interesting. And this is Alfred Stieglitz at the beginning of the 20th century. I've done several exhibits of so-called "vernacular" photography, and what I like about it is that those photographers are trying to communicate something direct about what's in front of them. Whether it's a family picnic or it's somebody who's dead or it's, you know, a cut-down tree or whatever. They're actually trying to get the idea onto the film in a very interesting way. And ironically, when they succeed they generally decide that it is a dumb picture. But it survives on the negatives in the old paper envelope from the drug store. What bothers me a little about new, digital photography is that a person takes a bunch of pictures and then sits there to delete, delete, delete. The exhibits I've done in my life are those pictures, the deleted ones. The multiple exposures and the stuff that, in fact, they're not aware that they're communicating something really complicated about what's in front of them. For my money, I'd rather look at the so-called amateur work. If your only distinction between amateur and professional is technical, then it doesn't matter to me. I don't see that as a distinction. EM: I was just talking to Aron on the way here about why don't we have, like, a giant, wonderful art festival, biennial style, something that's entirely fascinating, with works throughout the city? RS: Chicago is such an exciting place, culturally, that a lot of times we find it difficult to bring in things exciting enough to compete here, you know? EM: That's a good point. How do you even break through the noise that’s happening? I guess there is still some excitement in that sense. You're right. So you don't have a problem with Chicago as a cultural center of sorts, you're happy with all the activities? RS: Absolutely. EM: I don't know why I always want more. I always think it could be better, I think it could be. RS: Well, any city could be better. As an outsider from Seattle I am amazed at the tremendous number of large different immigrant communities here. But I don’t see a lot of overlap, of mutual celebration. We're working on a big Mexican show right now, and trying to judge how to communicate the ideas to a non-Hispanic audience. EM: I always feel that we're known for being a great architecture city, we have these great museums too, but I don't think we have any innovative or cutting edge activity that's known on an international level. I feel that there's so much great work that goes on here that we often lose a lot of artists to different cities. You can argue that it does not matter in this age of globalization, but it does matter. It does matter when the people can't find work here that they can't break through and develop their careers in the way they want. But maybe that's not our problem, maybe it's something not to worry about. I don't know why I'm so concerned about these things. AG: In light of what we earlier discussed concerning document and art, or photography in the context of Fine Art, I like the model at the MCA. They don't really have specific curators who do just photography or just painting or sculpture. There is an overlap. RS: That's actually a really good point. Because currently, universities are not hiring photographers or ceramicists or painters—they're hiring artists. The students are allowed to mix and match whatever they think is interesting. When I was going through Rochester Institute of Technology, we were encouraged to, say, mix photography with print making. Judy Natal, a colleague here at Columbia College, did just that with great success. Previously, even currently at most universities, this is discouraged because those are two different things and teachers say, “Well, it takes way too long to figure out how to do these crafts individually for people to be trying to do two things at once.” So the students are forced to be only photographers or print-makers or whatever. Now, in most big universities, that's changing quite radically and in a very good way. AG: I think a lot of graduate programs in photography are breaking down that border and not having the two degrees. The fine arts and the photography. They're just having a fine art degree, and I think that that's a really great thing. Coming out of Columbia as an undergraduate, I see that as being a problem here, the separation between the fine art and the photography. Having it be actually physical. Two buildings. EM: But they did start the inter-disciplinary arts program, didn't they? AG: They did, but that's a little different. EM: Yeah, they probably don’t have the same access to the laboratories as those students in the specific degree programs. AG: Yes, that is true. So at Columbia, you kind of have to make a choice, and I feel most photographers who came out of that program as undergraduates didn't take full advantage of taking classes in fine art. RS: This is a little off your point, but I have to confess, I don't know what fine art photography means. I'm not rejecting it, I just want to know what it means. Because the word seems to suggest that it's purely decorative. Would you say “fine art painting,” as opposed to “house painting?” You know, the difficult thing with photography is that every form of photography reflects on every other form of photography. I mean, if you're going to do lingerie ads, you better know how pornography works. If you're going take pictures of Yosemite, you better know how those things have been used satirically in the past. Or why, when Henry Jackson or Carlton Watkins or whoever else was making pictures of Yosemite, why they were making them in the first place. I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're a painter, you can paint until you're blue in the face and you'll never hear an instructor talk about house painting. But if you want to use photography as a tool for making art, you better know about house painting. You better know all the other functions of it. I think that sort of negates the need for "fine art photography." Artists grab the sharpest tool in the box and if photography is that tool, then they use it. EM: So you're advocating this notion of being trained, right? RS: Well, as long as you're being trained to do something, you need to communicate an idea. Content. You need to know how to make the picture, to do what you want it to do. If training keeps you from making a stupid picture, that's perfect. On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to teach people everything there is to know about hammers and never show them a nail.