Photographer and professor Brian Taylor says digital technology has persuaded people to take pictures first and be creative second. In the photography classes he’s taught at San Jose State University for 30 years, he has to convince students to slow down. He says that fine art photography, made arduously in a darkroom, is a form of meditation, one that teaches patience and bestows time enough to compose before a picture is taken, to think before clicking the shutter.
He also says “resistance” to digital photography is “futile.”
“I fully expect all of my students to walk out of the darkroom at the end of the semester and return to the fast-paced world of digital,” he emails. But they will be changed for having slowed down.
Then he admits that his slide presentation at Monterey Museum of Art-Pacific this Friday will be fast-paced, incorporating an array of photographs and photographers, from Katy Grannan and Todd Hido to locals Ted Orland and Martha Casanave, and a massive amount of information about what’s going on in contemporary photography today. He will talk trends and philosophical approaches, how photographers have stretched the medium across landscape, portraiture, still life and mixed media.
His talk is part of the museum’s series of special programming that spins off from its exhibits. This one has ties to Pacific Street Reimagined, in which works from the collection are rotated through galleries and augmented with activities.
Taylor, who has just become the new artistic director of the Center for Photographic Art, knows the MMA collection well and touts its preeminence as an archive for one of the most influential contemporary fine art photography movements of the West Coast – Ansel Adams and Edward Weston’s Group f/64.
“The photography gallery stands as a beautiful space in which visitors can enjoy magnificently printed artworks by masters of the medium,” Taylor writes.
He says photography trends include documentary work out of Russia showing everyday scenes that, to our eyes, are “so foreign to us they become absolutely surreal”; young people doing revealing and “confessional” autobiographical photos; and professional photojournalists documenting social inequities.
“Today, virtually everyone is a photographer and we’ve witnessed an explosion of insignificant photography as well as a plentitude of excellent photographers around the world,” he writes.
And he’ll sort out the lot for you.
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