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Work Does Not Speak For Itself - Moments of Mood, 4.0 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Matt: Does your work speak for itself?
• 0:02
  Matt: Because there's a very good chance you believe that it does, or at least you want it to.
• 0:08
  Matt: Now, in the last moments of mood episode, I told you to stop explaining your photographs.
• 0:14
  Matt: So let me be clear about the difference right away, because these are two different things, and mixing them up is exactly part of the problem.
• 0:24
  Matt: That part was about what people see in your pictures, about not telling a viewer what to feel or what an image means, because that part belongs to them.
• 0:34
  Matt: This commentary is about something else entirely.
• 0:37
  Matt: It's about getting your work seen at all.
• 0:40
  Matt: Because between your hard drive and any wall, page, or feed that matters, there are people.
• 0:46
  Matt: Curators, editors, jury panels, publishers, and every one of them is going to ask you questions about your work.
• 0:54
  Matt: What is it?
• 0:55
  Matt: Why did you make it?
• 0:56
  Matt: Why did you do it this way?
• 0:57
  Matt: Why does it matter now?
• 0:59
  Matt: And how well you answer decides whether the work actually goes anywhere.
• 1:03
  Matt: So in this episode, I want to look at why the work speaks for itself is a comforting lie.
• 1:10
  Matt: What a curator at one of the biggest photography museums in the world told me that she actually needs to hear from an artist.
• 1:16
  Matt: And the four questions that came out of that conversation, as well as my own research and own experience, that I think every photographer should be able to answer.
• 1:27
  Matt: And I would take these seriously because whether you ever sit in front of a reviewer curator or not, these questions are coming for your work.
• 1:36
  Matt: This is the Mood Podcast.
• 1:47
  Matt: I'm Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so that you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what it's about, and get it in front of the right people.
• 2:01
  Matt: And it's the only photography podcast that is itself a practice.
• 2:05
  Matt: Because every week I sit down with a guest or I break down a single idea in a commentary just like this one called Moments of Mood.
• 2:13
  Matt: Now, let's look at this belief honestly, because I understand exactly where it comes from.
• 2:21
  Matt: And this thing talking about your own work does feel a little bit grubby, doesn't it?
• 2:26
  Matt: It feels adjacent to marketing and self-promotion, to all the stuff we picked up a camera to actually get away from.
• 2:34
  Matt: And so we've built this romantic idea around the alternative, the photographer who says nothing, the mysterious artist, the work discovered in a drawer decades later.
• 2:45
  Matt: And of course, Vivian Meyer gets wheeled out as the patron saint of this, the nanny whose genius was found in a storage locker.
• 2:53
  Matt: And we tell ourselves that's how it works.
• 2:56
  Matt: That quality is a kind of homing signal.
• 2:58
  Matt: And if the pictures are good enough, the right people will eventually feel it and come.
• 3:04
  Matt: But think about what actually happened with Vivian Meyer, because it proves the opposite of what people use her for.
• 3:12
  Matt: Her work didn't speak for itself.
• 3:14
  Matt: It sat in boxes, completely silent for her entire life.
• 3:18
  Matt: It took another person buying those boxes, scanning the negatives, building the story, doing years of loud, unglamorous advocacy before anyone actually looked.
• 3:30
  Matt: The work had no voice till somebody gave it one.
• 3:33
  Matt: And that's the version where it worked out.
• 3:36
  Matt: We have no idea how many archives went to the landfill instead.
• 3:41
  Matt: And if I'm honest about my own history with this, the belief wasn't really about integrity anyway, I don't think.
• 3:48
  Matt: It was about safety.
• 3:50
  Matt: As long as I never had to say what my work was about, I never had to find out whether I could.
• 3:56
  Matt: This kind of silence felt almost noble, but I think it was mostly just a place to hide.
• 4:02
  Matt: Now, I recently sat down with Shana Lopes on the show.
• 4:07
  Matt: And Shana is a photography curator SF Moma, and we talked about exactly this.
• 4:12
  Matt: What happens when work arrives in front of the people who can actually put it on walls and in books?
• 4:19
  Matt: And a few things from that conversation sparked my memory and a few things I've returned to, hence this episode.
• 4:26
  Matt: The first one is structural, and I'd never fully appreciated it before.
• 4:30
  Matt: When a curator or a reviewer wants to bring a work into a collection, they have to defend it.
• 4:35
  Matt: Shana has to stand in front of committee and make a written argument and a spoken one for a few minutes on why this works specifically and why here.
• 4:45
  Matt: And before any of that, her own test for whether a project is even right is whether she can write about it.
• 4:51
  Matt: If she can't find enough to say about a body of work, that tells her that something is missing.
• 4:58
  Matt: Think about what that actually means.
• 5:00
  Matt: At one of the most important photography institutions in the world, the thing that moves work forward is somebody talking about it.
• 5:09
  Matt: Words aren't decoration on the process.
• 5:12
  Matt: Words are the process.
• 5:14
  Matt: If your photographs ever reach a room like that, they will live or die on sentences.
• 5:20
  Matt: The only question is who's writing them and how well that person understands what you actually made.
• 5:27
  Matt: And there are questions that she has to answer in that room, both for those inside and those outside.
• 5:33
  Matt: And this is where it gets directly useful for you, I think, because versions of them are coming for your work too.
• 5:40
  Matt: From a peer review or a museum or a grand jury, a publisher or a magazine or just a stranger deciding whether to keep looking.
• 5:48
  Matt: Why now?
• 5:49
  Matt: Why does this matter?
• 5:50
  Matt: Why should this be here of all places?
• 5:53
  Matt: And why should anyone beyond you care about it?
• 5:57
  Matt: Her example was something like fine, the project is about your grandmother.
• 6:02
  Matt: Why should a stranger care about your grandmother?
• 6:05
  Matt: And the answer isn't that they should care about her, of course.
• 6:09
  Matt: It's that the work has to reach something past her: illness, memory, whatever the universal thing underneath is.
• 6:17
  Matt: And you need to be able to name it.
• 6:20
  Matt: And then there's this question of your decisions.
• 6:24
  Matt: Shana told me that when she looks at work, she's wondering things like why slide film or why cyanotype or why this process for this subject.
• 6:34
  Matt: And when she asks and the artist says, I just thought it looked good, she's not very impressed with that kind of answer.
• 6:40
  Matt: And that's usually the end of the conversation.
• 6:43
  Matt: Because in the art world, with thousands of pictures, requests, and work coming across the eyes of all of those on the inside of the viewership, and also those outside, like us, are pedants about process because the choice either connects to what the work is about or it doesn't.
• 7:03
  Matt: And if you can't say how, maybe you just don't know yet.
• 7:07
  Matt: So out of all of that, I think there are four questions that I actually mentioned earlier, but are worth repeating.
• 7:14
  Matt: One, why now?
• 7:16
  Matt: Two, why does it matter?
• 7:18
  Matt: Three, why do you care?
• 7:20
  Matt: And four, why should we care?
• 7:23
  Matt: And notice not one of them is answered by photographs alone.
• 7:26
  Matt: The pictures can, of course, embody the answers.
• 7:29
  Matt: At their best, they do, but somebody still has to say them.
• 7:33
  Matt: And nobody is coming to say them for you.
• 7:36
  Matt: So let's settle the apparent contradiction with the last episode that could sit adjacent to this as a pair, because I want to make sure we discern how these topics are different yet complementary.
• 7:51
  Matt: Now, that moments of mood part was about the conversation between your photograph and a viewer.
• 7:57
  Matt: Stay out of that one.
• 7:58
  Matt: Don't stand next to an image telling people what to feel, and don't fence off the readings that you didn't intend, because those readings are information about what your work actually transmits.
• 8:11
  Matt: Now, what I'm talking about now is about a different conversation, the one between you and the people who decide whether your work gets shown.
• 8:20
  Matt: Show up to that one, of course, fully, because nobody's experience of your pictures is damaged by knowing what the project is or when it started or why you shot it on film.
• 8:31
  Matt: That's not telling anyone what to feel.
• 8:34
  Matt: That's telling them what it is.
• 8:35
  Matt: One conversation belongs to the viewer, and your job is to protect it, and the other belongs to you, and your job is to get good at it.
• 8:44
  Matt: And like I said, I think the two feed each other, right?
• 8:47
  Matt: Which is the part I find genuinely useful here.
• 8:50
  Matt: All those misreadings you collect when you stop explaining, all that information about the work transmits without you, that's this raw material you build the true account from.
• 9:02
  Matt: You stop explaining precisely so that later you have something honest to say.
• 9:08
  Matt: And Shana made a version of this point herself without me even asking.
• 9:13
  Matt: She said the work that excites her needs layers, needs some ambiguity.
• 9:18
  Matt: Because if a project is too on the nose and too obvious, she runs out of things to say about it.
• 9:24
  Matt: So keep the mystery in your pictures because that's where it belongs.
• 9:29
  Matt: And the plainness belongs in how you talk about them.
• 9:32
  Matt: Most of us have it backwards, right?
• 9:35
  Matt: Obvious images, mystified statements, jargon wrapped around work that gives everything away in one look.
• 9:42
  Matt: Shana sees hundreds of statements, and what she wants is almost embarrassingly simple.
• 9:48
  Matt: My work is about this.
• 9:50
  Matt: I've been making it since then.
• 9:51
  Matt: I use this process because of this.
• 9:54
  Matt: A hundred words or so, 200 at most.
• 9:57
  Matt: Nobody, she said, needs your six-paragraph artist statement.
• 10:02
  Matt: Now, those questions are simple to hear and genuinely hard to answer.
• 10:08
  Matt: And the difference between some kind of vague answer and a true one usually only shows up when you say it out loud to people who'll tell you whether it's actually present in the work.
• 10:19
  Matt: Trust me, I've been there.
• 10:21
  Matt: That's what the Mood Insiders is for.
• 10:23
  Matt: It's my community and the scoreboard is off, and it's exactly the room where you test whether what you're saying about the work is really in the work.
• 10:33
  Matt: The link is in the description, and hope to see you inside.
• 10:36
  Matt: The last thing, though, I want to do here is take the grubbiness out of all of this because I'm sure you're still feeling it, a little bit of opaqueness, that talking about your work is somehow beneath the work.
• 10:51
  Matt: So try this instead.
• 10:53
  Matt: Articulation isn't marketing, articulation is the final edit.
• 10:58
  Matt: The same judgment you use to sequence a body of work or to choose the strongest frame or to kill the images that don't belong.
• 11:06
  Matt: That same judgment, but applied to language, is what tells you what the project actually is.
• 11:12
  Matt: Chanish said something else in passing that I keep thinking about actually.
• 11:16
  Matt: Sometimes an artist reads her a beautiful statement, and then they look at the pictures together.
• 11:23
  Matt: And what the statement claims just isn't in the work.
• 11:27
  Matt: And then there's a real decision to face, right?
• 11:29
  Matt: Do you change the work or change the statement?
• 11:32
  Matt: Either way, you've just learned what your project actually is.
• 11:37
  Matt: And you only learned it by trying to say it.
• 11:40
  Matt: Now, I'm happy to say that I've experienced this in my own projects more than once.
• 11:46
  Matt: And that moment that the words and the pictures finally agree is usually the moment the project becomes finishable, maybe.
• 11:53
  Matt: So, no, the work doesn't speak for itself, it speaks through you.
• 11:57
  Matt: It always did.
• 11:58
  Matt: The photographers who understand that aren't diluting their art.
• 12:02
  Matt: What they're doing is they're finishing it.
• 12:05
  Matt: So sit and meditate with this.
• 12:08
  Matt: Why now?
• 12:09
  Matt: Why does it matter?
• 12:10
  Matt: Why do you care?
• 12:12
  Matt: Why should we?
• 12:13
  Matt: Then practice your answers.
• 12:15
  Matt: Brainstorm them, then compress them, no jargon, the way you'd say it to one person across a table.
• 12:22
  Matt: And then put it to the real test.
• 12:24
  Matt: Put that hundred words or so next to your pictures and ask whether what you've claimed is actually present in your work.
• 12:31
  Matt: If it is, you now have the thing most photographers never built.
• 12:35
  Matt: A true account of your own project, ready for any room your work walks into.
• 12:40
  Matt: And if it isn't, you just found out where the work needs to go next.
• 12:43
  Matt: And that's worth more than any compliment the pictures could have collected in silence.
• 12:49
  Matt: Happy shooting.