Category: art school

Dear Visual Studies

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, art school, artgame, olden ways

what is clear to me

by now it is clear that you aren’t returning my check; it is clear that you didn’t keep your commitment to provide reprints, or return my check.

it is clear that your structure is the same as any other business, run simply, sloppily made rules, carried out by functionaries aware of their vacation, treating research requests as interruptions.

I expect dishonesty, false promises from a profit business; that is the founding basis of opaque blind commerce. That shouldn’t be  the basis or philosophy for a non-profit, otherwise, there is no need to make tax or structural distinction among them. If they act the same, they are the same.

now isn’t then;

then when Visual Studies Workshop was a fertile place, bold: attracting the committed, driven by a mission spirit, with a goal of a broadening, rather than a deadening future. a place beyond the market drivers, something other than a tax deduction.

what may not be clear to you

is how much VSW has changed. what you were, and what you’ve become; where you were headed, and how far off course you’ve gotten.

Turning a non-profit into an organization that is as layered, with interactions like a profit business is pretense and false promise. It is also bad mimicry. No small business succeeds with so much pretentious departmentalization over such small amounts of money. They would die of overhead and organizational inertia.

Robert Adams:

Posted on Posted in art school, on photographersTagged

Bibliography (read in light of New Topographics)

Robert Adams

  • Adams, Robert. “Nature Photography Can Include Us.” Sierra Club Bulletin.
  • Adams, Robert. The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range.
  • Adams, Robert. Review of Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy in The Colorado Magazine (Fall, 1974).
  • 14 American Photographers. Introduction by Renato Danese. Exhibition catalogue. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1975.
  • Baltz, Lewis. Review of The New West by Robert Adams. Art in America 63 (2) (March-April 1975): 41-2.
  • Adams, Robert. D Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area.
  • Colorado: Colorado Associated Press in cooperation with The State Historical Society of Colorado, 1977.
  • Jordon, Bill. “Book Reviews: Denver and The New West,” Photography 1 (4) (July 1977): 30-31.
  • Meinwald, Dan. Afterimage 4 (4) (July 1977): 17.
  • Patton, Phil. “Special Section: Photography Books”, Art in America 65 (6) (November/December 1977): 35-36.
  • Lifson, Ben. “Robert Adams: Notes Toward a Supreme Landscape.” The Village Voice (February 26, 1979).
  • Adams, Robert. From the Missouri West. New York: Aperture, 1980.
  • Armitage, Shelly. “Robert Adams: Post Modernism and Meaning”. Exposure 18 (2) (1981 ): 49-59.
  • Grundberg, Andy. “The Point of Photographs.” New York Times, (November 29, 1981 ): 13-14.
  • Adams, Robert. To Make It Home Photographs of the American West. New York:
  • Aperture, 1989.
  • Adams, Robert. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture, 1994.
  • Adams, Robert. What We Bought: The New World. Scenes From the Denver Metropolitan Area 1970-1974. Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 1995.
  • Jones Jr., Malcolm. “The Littoral Truth.” Newsweek, November 13, 1995.
  • Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West. Exhibition catalogue. Edited by May Castleberry. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996.
  • Kemmerer, Allison; John R. Stilgoe, Adam D. Weinberg. Reinventing the West.
  • Belz, Emily. “Western Expansion”. Art New England 23 (5) (August/September, 2002): 18-19.
  • Adams, Robert. Commercial Residential Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range, 1968-1972. PPP Editions, 2003.