Reject

2012 is off to a roaring start. January is barely over and I've already been rejected for 2 shows. At this rate I'll surpass last year's total by June. The worst part is I can't even save the rejection letters. Instead of the nicely typed form letter they used to send (which I collect in a large file), rejections now come as generic email: "Dear _____, We received many bla bla bla...and yours was not bla bla bla..." Not really worth saving. In fact it feels pretty good to delete.

One of my more entertaining rejection letters, 2005, from Lenswork
Oh well. Rejection is part of the artistic process, right? Nothing ventured nothing gained. It's just that it seems to be happening a lot lately. I can't actually remember the last time a submission of mine was approved.

Truth be told I may have a bit of a self-destructive streak. I don't have much patience for applications. They usually ask for a Resume or CV. I don't understand why. What could possibly be less important in judging someone's photos? It's like asking someone what color eyes they have. So lately I've been like, fuck it, I may as well submit the resume I want to, which turned out to be this:

I, Blake Andrews, do solemnly swear that I have checked off the requisite requirements for an artistic resume, having been included in a suitable number of approved gallery shows, publications, collections, bla bla bladity bla bla bla…

BORN Berkeley, CA 1968

EDUCATION Bla bla bla bla bla bla bla 1992 bla

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS The usual places, and some unusual ones too

HABITS I strongly suspect that I am stuck being a photographer for good

LIVING SITUATION In Eugene with wife, kids and four chickens. I have brown eyes.

In addition to a resume most applications ask for photographs to be titled. My photos don't have titles, at least not when they're not being submitted somewhere. Lack of titles can actually work in one's favor, since it's a golden opportunity to label photos Untitled. Or better yet a passive-aggressive nontitle that actually is one, Untitled (Woman Sleeping at 4 am by a Quiet Brook) or something. Curators love that shit.

I tried labeling a photo Untitled just to see how it fit. Perfect. But I didn't want every photo to have the same name. That might be boring, and the last thing I'd want to do is bore a curator. So I played with the word Untitled and came up with some anagrams and other variations.


Then came the artist statement. Since I didn't really have one I decided to borrow from Robert Frank's 1954 Guggenheim application. I figured if it worked for him I might have some luck using it.

Guggenheim Application, 1954, Robert Frank
But Frank's application was a bit wordy. That style may have worked in the fifties but people don't really communicate like that anymore. I think most curators nowadays are looking for something short and sweet, something that cuts to the chase. So I submitted a condensed version:

Project goals: To photograph freely throughout The Willamette Valley, using the Diana camera exclusively. The making of a broad, voluminous picture record of things in the valley past and present. This project is essentially the visual study of Western Oregon and will include caption notes; but it is only partly documentary in nature: one of its aims is more artistic than the word documentary implies.

This was a fairly accurate description of my project, plus it paid homage to a living legend. When I submitted the thing several weeks ago with photos, titles, and resume, I thought my acceptance would be a slam dunk. But no dice. Rejected. I guess I don't know curators so well after all.

OK, so I sabotaged my submission and I have no one to blame but myself. Although I'm still sorting out my exact motivations, I think part of me didn't really want a show. All that time and money that I would've spent printing and spotting and matting and framing is now freed up. I can get back to sipping daiquiris by the pool. So in one sense it's a bit of a relief, one less thing to worry about.

Another rejection letter from my large personal collection
But it does raise the question of why anyone would bother. I look at photographers who have show after show after show in all parts of the world, sometimes multiple shows at once. How do they do it? It's a full-time job just prepping the photos, not to mention the rest of it. Then the show goes up, you hear no feedback, you wonder if anyone sees it, nothing sells. In a few weeks you take down the show and put it all back in the closet. Talk about a treadmill. And for what?

I'm guessing many photographers have asked themselves the same question. Doug Brewer raised the issue directly on FPN last week:

"Here's a serious question: Should I give up?

After decades of frustration, rejection and being ignored, I've finally come to realize that nobody likes my photography. I know we're supposed to only do this for ourselves, and yadda yadda, and I do, but we also want to share work with others, but at what point do I accept that others don't want me to share with them?"

Doug's post generated all sorts of interesting comments, mostly supportive. Keep at it, Doug. Follow your heart, Doug. That sort of thing. Which is fine in one sense. If you really feel your calling to do something, you've got to chase that star no matter what.


But the broader issue, not really addressed in the FPN discussion, is What if the star you're chasing is in fact a dud? What if you've devoted your life to something you're actually not very good at, but you don't realize it? I see a lot of photos in galleries made by people who probably believe in themselves, but that doesn't mean the work belongs in a gallery. But the thing is, the photographer himself can't tell. Everyone believes in their work. I feel great about my photos, but so does every other Joe Shmoe on Flickr. Maybe I am Joe Shmoe.

This is where outside arbiters can be very valuable. If one meets with continual rejection it might be a sign. Then again it might not be. You can't be sure.

I don't know what the answer is. I keep telling myself I'm done submitting to all these calls. Then sure enough I go and do it again. But if one continues to submit over and over again in the face of rejection, expecting the result to change, isn't that the very definition of insanity? That thought's occurred to me many times over the years. Yet I still reject it.

Snowman

Shot this in a bar a few nights ago with the Fuji. The hazy character is Faulkner Short, a damned good photographer in his own right, but this time he was on the receiving end. He looks like a snowman here with charcoal buttons but the black spots didn't actually exist. They're just Clayden Effect artifacts reflected in the pint glass. Or maybe I was on the verge of blacking out and my camera was already anticipating what was about to happen. Sometimes it's two stops ahead.

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Hot Tub Time Machine

Ridiculous Nesuptilno

I get a lot of email, most of which I delete immediately. Which is how I wound up accidentally erasing a message in November that turned out to be very important. It was a renewal notice for my website's domain registration which was due to expire 1/14/12.

But I didn't know that at the time. In fact I didn't realize it until last week when someone asked me if I'd seen my website recently. Here's how it looked last Sunday:


That's a generic placeholder for expired sites.

Honestly I'd been considering revamping my site for a while. And this new site did offer a certain elegant simplicity. It wasn't quite what I had in mind —a little heavy on the ad/content ratio— but maybe I could work with it. So I spent a little time exploring. My first stop was the irresistible "Jesus You Are" link, which brought up this page:


Gee whiz, low cost car insurance and Bible study, all in one handy location. How convenient is that!

But that was just the start. The site also came complete with all sorts of other stuff. Baby name listings, for example.


And IRA information:


It seemed to have just about anything a person could want on a photo site. It had my name. It had a revenue stream. It had Jesus. And the best thing was it was free. No action was needed on my site to keep this placeholder up.

It was very tempting but I wasn't quite ready to pull the trigger. Not without sleeping on it. I decided to leave the new site up there for a few days and ponder the situation. Maybe I'd get some feedback that would help me with my decision.

From Sunday afternoon to Tuesday evening the new site stayed online while I thought about it. I got a few emails but they were mostly unhelpful. "What the hell's up?" asked one. "Hey, your site's down," said another. Fine feedback but not well researched. I could tell they hadn't explored the new site in any serious way, so I had to discount those comments in my analysis.

One thing was clear. I needed a site. Although my blog is probably the core of my online presence these days, I still depend on my website for certain functions. It's a sort of backlog of past photo projects, not to mention it's my main repository of baby names.

After a few days my decision became clear. I wanted my old site back. I tracked down the company, paid my renewal, and within a few hours my original website was back online, though still needing a revamp. It was almost as if nothing had changed.

When I'm not choosing baby names, I'm diving for loose balls
In addition to my blog and photo site I have a variety of other online pursuits. Keeping current with all of them can be a constant juggling act. Last week for example I starred in this hardcore gay porn flick (Warning: Do NOT open at work), which was fun to shoot but very hard. I also occasionally moonlight as a stage hypnotist, an employment lawyer and a part time soccer goalie.

A discussion thread at Forum.hr
With all of these online activities it's hard to pick a highlight, but if forced to choose I think the greatest honor was when my name made the rounds a few weeks ago at Forum.hr, a site most readers should recognize. After all it's one of the top 20 online photo forums in the Balkans. I've transcribed the relevant passage below. I'm not sure if the language is Croatian or Serbian or something else, so my Google translation may be slightly off. But as far as I can tell it went something like this:

Person A: "All are excellent, but only few of them 'play it in your head that people see and unwashed' totally I like to move the humor in them."

Person B: "I will not go into whether the quality, I can only say that I totally neinspirativne, what are the worst when I see photos supposedly good photographer. I do not know, I do not understand what's so great about them."

Person A: "Man who has photos or prejebeno subtle, or completely ridiculous nesuptilno. Now, if you watch them as photos etc then people look wrong. Watch stacking geometry, lights, shadows, lines, shapes and things that resemble each other."

Couldn't have said it better myself. And maybe I did.

Anyhoo, I'm mostly back to normal now. My main photo site is back up. The only snafu is that while it was down I did not receive any email through my site. So if you sent a messages earlier this week, chances are I did NOT receive it. Hopefully it wasn't anything important like a domain renewal.