Jerk? Nerd? Oh, why decide?

Twice recently I've managed to piss off classmates with not-very considered comments. Each time I've found myself somewhat surprised. For the most part, as I've gotten older I've found my sense of humor, and that odd adolescent drive to say something "controversial" and shocking, has mellowed and cooled. I don't really have any particular investment in upsetting anyone anymore, for the most part.

Which I suppose is why I find myself a little off-balance when it happens anyway.

In critique today I pissed off a classmate good and plenty. How did this happen?

First, perhaps, it might be necessary to give some degree of context, and background. In brief: this classmate and I have been in the same department from the same starting point. We've shared many classes, instructors, and prior critiques. We rarely have conflict. In fact, you could tentatively say that we're friendly, though probably not what, strictly speaking, you'd call friends. In a lot of ways that count, we're essentially almost strangers.

(It also must be made somewhat clear that when I say "critique," I'm using the term extremely loosely. Nearly no one in my class is interested in learning to discuss photographs intelligently. It took me two years to realize that it wasn't going to just happen automatically, and that I better read a fucking book or ten on the matter, because, to me, it's important as hell. About as important as I can envision.)

Her work. Prior to this semester it was very restrained, formal, and nuanced landscapes, and a smattering of sensitive portraiture. This semester she took pictures of her television, showing Midnight Cowboy, and began exploring a sequence of self-portraits. A drastic and violent shift inward, which I wouldn't say alarmed me, but certainly caught me off guard. This should be exciting, no? A new direction. An inward gaze frightens me, somewhat. I think it may be one of the most challenging directions a photographer can take their work. Which, to me, means that it has a far greater chance of failing miserably than succeeding splendidly. The impulses to clean, protect, and beautify are almost irresistible. To me, that's pure poison. A glowing, siren-shrieking bio-hazard symbol.

She's expressed an interest in using a high ISO. This is something that I've been a little surprised to see as an emerging collective preference of a lot of my class's work. My thoughts on this are far from formed.

I would say that, often, I'm impressed with what she does. I think she has great potential, and feel confident that if she continues producing photographic output that she will amass a fine body of work.

Fair? I'm not blowing smoke. I would say that she had a bead on her methods and style much earlier than I did; she's been moving toward it almost since our first semester together, whereas it's taken me until just this semester to begin to get a handle on what I want to be shooting, and how.

That being said....

There are two issues in evaluating the images we were looking at today.

The first is that it was an assignment involving compositing. I should say upfront that I am somewhat biased toward this technique. As with anything, it can be utilized very well, with a level of mediocrity, or poorly. Mostly what I've seen have been the latter two. I get the tremendous application potential, and the strength and flexibility that it grants toward commercial imagery. But as with any specific photographic technique, I think it requires a great deal of practice and nuance, training, foresight, and talent in execution. It seems, to me, to be a much more painterly approach toward image making.

Simply, it's not really my thing.

It's one of the more concrete, specific iterations of the hackneyed "film vs. digital" debate. A debate that, at least in my school, everyone seems quite content to ignore.

Image building, versus image making, perhaps. Fantasy or straight photography.

Still, we execute assignments because, in this school, that is part of what we do.

The second issue has to do, again, with personal bias.

The image that sparked our brouhaha was an overlay, double exposure type thing combining a portrait I'd seen before and a film still, taken from a photograph from a television, from Midnight Cowboy.

Things I've seen before. But not, to me, an evolution or development of these pieces I'm familiar with. Everything that had irked or concerned me about the film capture appropriation approach was still present. As well as a rising sense of boredom.

So we started talking.

Talking about a piece is different than writing about a piece. In writing, I have the opportunity to return to what I've written and ruthlessly edit, refine, and make clear what I'm trying to say.

In conversation, I have a hand full of darts. About four. And I throw.

"A feminist critique of this work would criticize the feeling of domesticity emanating from that television screen."

Oy.

What a fucking idiot I am. Men a thousand times smarter than myself have probably made personal, internal pacts to avoid discussing anything related to "feminism."

The response: immediate anger.

Problem: her reaction was to tell me that, essentially, my reading was wrong because it absolutely did not match her intentions as the executor.

My response was that we were now discussing a question of authorial control (what I had meant was authorial intentionality), and that my stance was that she had no claim to a right to veto my statements. (In what I think of as a "straight" photo, an appeal to return to the actual subject of the picture wouldn't have been out of hand; but at this level of abstraction, I claim that I can think what I want with a greater degree of validity.)

All this came from my wanting to examine questions of an inward gaze, and the inherent domesticity of a television screen. Eventually I managed to come around to what I'd wanted to in the first place; that isolation and insulation are more generic human conditions than ones specific to a gender, but the whole thing was well and truly fucked by this point.

It ended in conversational armistice. Everyone was only interested in attacking me for a statement that, to me, I had already nullified.

"Be angry," I said, again bored, and now frustrated.

The rabble made comments they took as clever; it's not that deep! Don't be a nerd! A later photograph was prefaced by its taker with, "There isn't, like, a concept," to which someone replied, "Don't worry. Someone will make something up." (The work was far too boring to bother thinking much of anything. And also, in an extremely ironic state of affairs, so was my own composite tacked to the wall that we failed to have the time to get to. Although I still choose to congratulate myself on a display of competent masking, if not anything particularly clever.)

You know what? Fuck right off. Your eye-shadow isn't externalizing your anguish, millenial.

What I would have liked to have happened (and I suppose, as a lesson that can be learned, what I'll attempt to do if anyone manages to say anything about one of my photographs that makes me angry) is for someone of a cool temperament to say, "Let's unpack that statement."

Because when I rode the train home tonight, tired, having shot something that I was trying to figure out, and replaying the critique in my head to figure out how exactly I'd detonated that bomb, I unpacked it myself.

I said the opposite of what I'd meant to say.

What I had meant was, "A misogynistic reading of this work would say that the feeling of domesticity emanating from that television is a byproduct of your being a female photographer."

Which probably would have pissed her off even more; but at least it might have been true.

Now pardon me while I go memorize lines from In the Company of Men & Oleanna.