I was a shut-in all weekend, desperately trying to finish the slideshow for my book tour, and missed the entirety of the first annual New York Photo Festival. Smart move or what? So I relied on The Jackanory for snappy coverage of all the razzmatazz. Now comes Robert Wright with a smart take on Various Photographs, one the four main shows at the festival, curated by Tim Barber.

So I am back to [Tim] Barber. His show [Various Photographs] demonstrates what we have done with the legacy of Eggleston’s Democratic Forest. We have been concerned with people up trees. And the mundane, and the ephemeral, but I don’t think we have absorbed, or maybe we have abandoned the lessons of Eggleston which is to make pictures democratically, not “of everything” but of everything equally. In other words, photography is not about “the subject.” It is about the total, the picture, the picture “problem.” It is people AND trees if that is your bag.

Why do I think Various Photographs is problematic?

It adopts the view that authorship is incidental, that photography can be characterized as collecting, and that you can photograph “anything.”

It is the reverse: authorship is everything, photography is not collecting and it is not about photographing “anything,” it is about treating everything in the photograph as equal.

Read the rest.