The Digital Curator

PDN Online

The Digital Curator - Curated blogs and online galleries are playing an ever more influential role in the fine-art world.
July 2, 2009 
By Conor Risch

This image by Satomi Shirai was featured on Jörg M. Colberg’s Conscientious blog in February 2009. Shirai says she was contacted by other photographers and bloggers after the post.

In October 2008, the Aperture Foundation published a set of five soft-cover monographs in collaboration with Tinyvices, the online gallery founded in 2005 by Tim Barber. Aperture’s press release noted prominently that Barber had “curated” the series, which presented the work of five up-and-coming photographers who had been featured on Tinyvices.

This was not the first time the curator of an online photo gallery had been asked to show a selection of images in a more traditional setting. Bloggers Laurel Ptak, who created the I Heart Photograph blog, and Jörg M. Colberg, the creator of the Conscientious blog, for example, have in recent years mounted exhibitions at commercial galleries, and are also asked to attend portfolio reviews. As a result of his work for Humble Arts Foundation, which began as an online exhibition space, Amani Olu has curated gallery shows and participated in two art fairs this year. Barber himself first mounted his “Various Photographs” exhibition, based on his popular and eclectic online group shows, at Spencer Brownstone gallery in 2006. But the collaboration with Aperture, which translated the fast and loose esthetic of Barber’s constantly changing Web site to the permanent pages of a book, represents the most concrete example of how influential photo blogs and curated Web sites have become.

Aperture’s Michael Famighetti, who edited the Tinyvices books, sees Tinyvices as one of the first Web sites to function like a gallery. “Tinyvices itself became an institution on the Web, at least with a certain circle of people. I thought it would be good for Aperture to team up with Tim to create another platform for emerging artists.”

Few photo bloggers or online curators set out to create launching pads for emerging photographers, or to establish a new curatorial voice. For some, photo blogs were a hobby. Colberg began his Conscientious blog seven years ago because he felt isolated living in Pittsburgh and wished there were more opportunities to look at photography. Ptak says she started I Heart Photograph after feeling frustrated with “going to galleries and looking through the pages of art magazines and always seeing the same photographers. I just knew there had to be more going on in the margins.” Andy Adams built Flak Photo in 2004 when his job at a historical photo archive and his interest in blog culture converged into a daily practice of posting contemporary photography online.

Like traditional curators and gallery directors, bloggers and online curators look at work constantly—in magazines, at galleries, on Web sites and in the e-mails they receive from photographers. They pluck out photos they like—or that they think are interesting to critique and discuss—and then post them for others to see. Unlike traditional curators or gallerists, however, they don’t have to justify their decisions to museum boards, they have no overhead, and they don’t have to sell work to survive. They experiment, take risks, and exhibit work that a traditional curator might never consider showing. They are guided only by their personal tastes, yet they have found a growingand loyal audience.

The Value of a Filter
“Thousands and thousands of people visit my site every day,” Barber says. “If I had a gallery and thousands of people showed up everyday, it would be a problem.”

That popularity, Ptak says, has made her think about her role. “Once you follow the stats of your Web site and realize that a certain number of people want to know what you’re thinking about everyday, for me that’s when it switched and I started to feel like the editor of a magazine or a curator of an art collection,” says Ptak.

Blogs can show more work to more people faster than brick-and-mortar venues. To many museumand gallery curators, that makes them a useful resource when they’re looking for new artists.

Lisa Sutcliffe, an assistant curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, says blogs are valuable in her research. “I like to see who they’re picking and why, and I think it gives me a greater sense of what’s going on, because there are people I maybe wouldn’t ordinarily see otherwise.”

“Blogs are the latest, best means to present and distribute information about contemporary art,” says Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Edward Robinson, who is an associate curator in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department.

Gallerist W.M. Hunt of Hasted Hunt Gallery says he appreciates Colberg’s tastes and insights. “He’sahead of me in terms of looking [at work], so if he recommends something I’ll go and look.”

Michael Foley, owner of the Michael Foley Gallery in New York, calls the curated Web sites “an opinionated filter” of new photography. “A guy like me sits on the fifth floor of a building on 11th Avenue and hopes to find the next greatest photographer, and the question is always, ‘Well, how do I do that?’” Foley says he goes to MFA and group shows, but he also likes to look online to see how people are reacting to new work. Knowing an artist has been featured on the right blogs or Web sites can make a difference in his evaluation, he says, though he adds that a lot of online exposure for a photographer may mean he’s too late. “My biggest fear is that this workabout and discovered that somebody is already representing that artist.”

The Democracy of the Web
Updated constantly, blogs and online galleries have shortened the time between a photographer’s creation of new work and when they can show it to an audience.

“In the past it was a little bit harder for photographers to get their work out and to knock on the right doors,” says Colberg. “With big gallerists reading my blog or other blogs I think there’s a better chance for somebody who is completely unknown to land a coup with a big gallery that maybe would have been out of reach 20 years ago.”

Bloggers and online curators are now inundated with promotions from photographers clamoring for their attention. Colberg says roughly ten percent of the images photographers e-mail him end up on his blog. Galleries also recognize the value of bloggers’ attention.

Gallery owner Yancey Richardson says that she doesn’t look at blogs to find work, but she does send them announcements of new shows.

PDN contacted two dozen photographers who have been featured in the past year on influential blogs and online galleries to find out how the exposure affected their careers. Increased traffic on their Web sites, invitations to participate in online print auctions, contact from curators and photo editors, placement of images with magazines, and positive feedback and correspondence with other photographers were among the benefits they received from online exposure.

After photographer Robin Schwartz’s images of her daughter interacting with animals appeared on Tinyvices, she was chosen to be included in Barber’s book series with Aperture, which then led to new representation at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles. She also “received requests from publications from Spain, France, Mexico, Germany and particularly in Asia,” whose editors had seen her work on Barber’s site, she says. Her work has also been featured on several other fine-art blogs and Web sites.

Colberg featured the work of photographer Jennifer Boomer on his site last year. “For months after Jörg made mention of my work, his Web site remained at spot number 1 or 2 for bringing traffic to my Web site,” Boomer says. “To this day, I still have people mention that they first heard of my work through his fine-art blog.”

Forging a New Esthetic?
At a time when many traditional galleries are scaling back shows in order to save money in a down economy, bloggers and online curators continue to showcase the latest ideas and trends in photography. And, by some accounts, these trends are now filtering up into traditional, more conservative art venues.

Ptak notes, “In the last year in Chelsea, I’ve seen a lot more group shows that replicate the kinds of things that I think you see a lot on my blog.” She adds, “I don’t know if it’scoincidental, or directly related.”

Gallery owner Foley, for one, doesn’t think the edgy work blogs and online galleries like Tinyvices have championed represents a new trend. “I think that people who have been in this business long enough don’t need a blog to verify or recatgorize visual images.” He argues that where the blogs have had the greatest influence is in encoaudience interested in photography.

Hunt, who teaches a class on curating at the School of Visual Arts, says that the Web has become an excellent place for young curators to experiment and build an audience. If he had had another month with his students this year, he says he would have had them create a blog. “Putting a framed show on
the wall is just irrelevant,” he tells his students. “It’s not going to communicate the vitality of your ideas and your eye. I want you to do shows that reflect your age and what your contemporaries are doing, find a way of creating prodcan exist electronically now.”

It’s debatable whether popular blogs and online galleries are capable of pushing new esthetics that influence galleries and museums. They may simply be publicizing great work that other curators would have found eventually. What is undeniable, however, is that the most respected and astute bloggers and online curators can be valuable champions for photographers shut out of traditional venues. And as long as their tastes and opinions wield influence in the fine art world, more and more photographers will be sending them new work with the hope of winning their stamp of approval. 

Links referenced within this article

Tinyvices
http://tinyvices.com
I Heart Photograph
http://iheartphotograph.blogspot.com/
Conscientious
http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/
Humble Arts Foundation
http://humbleartsfoundation.org/main.html
Flak Photo
http://www.flakphoto.com/

Article source: http://pdnonline.com