how to get featured

05 May 2011

How to get featured on Verve Photo’s Documentary Photography blog in 3 easy steps:

1. Buy a plane ticket to a third-world country or an urban slum.
2. Take a portrait of a destitute resident in their modest home lit by sunlight through the one window.
3. Write some bullshit artists’ statement about socioeconomic disparity or religious tension or something that has nothing to do with your photo of some lady in her hovel, really, but plays well in the art community.

Exhibits:

1. One
2. Two
3. Three
4. Four
5. Five
6. Six
7. Seven

I could go on, but anyways. Don’t get me wrong: most of the stuff they feature is awesome, but they seem to have a hardon for this cliche that seems long since expired. They could all maybe work as part of one collection – you know, some crap about people in living spaces, or something (which has been done and done over again) – but as individual photos by all these different artists, it doesn’t work at all. What do these photos tell us about their inhabitants, really? Very little, except some sort of very puerile “garsh, there are *poor

indigent

foreign

different* folks?!” lesson of disparity. It’s getting to be as bad as homeless photography. It’s time to retire this formula. Thus I have spake.