I sit here, on March 5th, with the weather being sunny and close to 70 degrees in the heartland of the US, and I cannot help but think about one situation that has perplexed me for the past five or six years, and as I look around the country, it continues to baffle me. It is why people, mostly in academia and fine arts, turn their noses up at photojournalists/concert (music) photographers, etc.
The issue here is that yes, there is a “high nose” attitude about art, fine art, that has been there in the world for as long as art has been around. I know this as the truth as I studied Art History for my undergraduate degree at Baker University and earned my Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Photography from one of the best/most prestigious fine arts schools in the United States, from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)/ a school that constantly ranks within the top five rankings in almost EVERY category that one can think of.
So the question begs, that since I decided to do concert photography for my career, why does the fine art community turn their noses up at this work and look the other way? Let’s break down the differences between the two since we know the similarities (for the most part)
First let’s look at fine art photography. When one thinks of “fine art”, what comes to mind? Something that you will see in a gallery or museum, hanging off the way in a frame, with a gallery light shining down directly on the image to help it stick out against a flat gray or white wall? The subject can be a lot of different things, from a still life of fruit to a portrait of someone, usually someone that is different than the average gallery or museum viewer, something that they can quickly walk away from if the image is too disturbing, and resort back to their everyday comforts of life. This is all fine and good, and personally I love going to galleries and museums to look at work. It is to be noted that museums show a LOT more photography than galleries do and by FAR. Also, galleries tend to be more of a “click” atmosphere, meaning that if you are friends with the gallery owner or friends of a friend, you are more likely to be able to show than someone who is new, coming off the street.
I do know this to be true, no matter how much people will sit back and say that it is not or that I am talking out of the side of my face. I have done a lot of gallery exhibitions in my time and have been too a lot. Before the pandemic, I was showing my work up to five times a year, which was awesome. I loved the opening day, seeing all of the people out, some that you have invited, others that have come in off the street, some coming in by word of mouth. The last exhibition that I had in my home city of Lawrence was right before the Covid shutdown, and the gallery (which did not survive the shut down) said that that opening was one of, if not the biggest opening that they had ever had. The exhibition actually stayed up for an extra month because of the people that wanted to see it. It was amazing.
However, usually in fine art work, everything is staged, even if it might be documentary work. You, as the artist/photographer, can take control over EVERYTHING from the lights, the way someone is posed, to what they are holding, to where they are looking…you can move closer or further back from the subject, change your height in relation to them if you want to, etc. You usually even have the ability to have an extended amount of time with the subject that you are shooting so you can take your time photographing them, sometimes taking a few hours to compose and get your one shot that you want, shooting and reshooting until it is as perfect as you would like for it to be as the artist/photographer. It is actually a pretty amazing and cushy way to go.
However, photojournalists and concert photographers are not, and I repeat NOT any different than documentary photographers. I know this because when I am not working on my concert photography work, I am working on either my We Are All We Have Tonight collection or the Living with Sam collection. The difference is here, that I have all the time in the world to work on and shoot the Living with Sam collection, hell I am now married and live with the lady. So that gives me even that much more access and I can shoot it whenever I want. The We Are All We Have Tonight collection is a little harder because the images does cover a select group of people, the punk rock community, in black and white film (which LwS is all digital), but when I have the opportunity to shoot that collection, as I will in about a week from now, I will (thank you to the band Anti-Flag).
But when I apply to a local gallery, with some of the best concert photography that I have created over the past year or two, have a nitch in the ability to print a certain size, and everyone around certain gallery spaces that I have applied to in Lawrence loves my work and follows it closely (there are at least two galleries that are like this) and the directors don’t answer proposals or when they do they make the comments that the work is too “pop” and not fine art…it makes me scratch my head a little bit.
See, in concert photography, as I have stated before in the other updates, we don’t have really any control over ANYTHING when we are shooting. We are either stuck in a photo pit or back by the soundboard, we have no control over the movements of the subjects that we are shooting, we have no control over the lights that are constantly changing and flashing, sometimes we are in the pit by ourselves (which yes, does give a little move movement possibilities for us) or with up to five or six other photographers, all fighting to get a unique shot what is sometimes no more than a 12 foot long, 3 foot wide walk way.
My question is that I would like to ask, is what is more impressive; the photographer who has control over every aspect of the shoot, setting it up exactly the way that he or she wanted it and dreamed about it? Or the photographer who has created a gorgeous image out of something, a situation that they had absolutely NO control over. To me, the answer is clear, they are both as impressive as the other. It is just a different way that the photographer came out with the same answer, a gorgeous print of something rather remarkable to look at. It doesn’t matter if it is “pop” in style, or is called such. If pop art could not be considered fine art, well there goes everything from Pop Art of the 1960 (Looking at you Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg) to modern art today (Jeff Koons…sorry, even Shepard Ferry and the beloved Banksy…and thousands of others in both categories).
So the last question is…why is photography, and not just concert work that I normally do (because yes, I am very well aware that there are new galleries starting to pop up that are devoted to NOTHING more than music/concert photography, but this was out of necessity because no one else would show the work), but photography in general looked at with such a “non-art” glance, and my We Are All We Have Tonight punk rock portraits considered more artistic than the photographs I did of Carlos Santana, The Who, The New Kids on The Block, or Alicia Keys? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. And this goes for my friends/idols as well, like Ruddy Roye, Bob Gruen, Mick Rock, Danny Clinch, and others (as you can tell, not everyone is a concert photographer who I have listed on there) are not taken as seriously or shown as seriously as others. Is it time? Is it because the other photographers, the ones that are shown more often than others, dead? What do modern gallery directors and owners have against photography?