William Bragg

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I’ve been making updates to the William Bragg Photography site, and would love some feedback. One issue I’ve noticed is that the site doesn’t seem to load all the photos in each portfolio unless I resize the browser window. There should be 12 images in each portfolio (People 1, People 2, Music). So feedback about the site operability as well as comments about the photos themselves are very welcome. Thanks so much!

I’ve been crazy busy for the last couple of weeks. I wish I could say that it was for all new and exciting projects, but unfortunately that’s not the case. It’s been mostly maintenance and organizing. In fact I survived one real scary event of losing a number of files. Thankfully, I’ve been keeping regular backups.

But there has been some new and very positive developments in my photographic existence over this same time period. More on that later.

One element of housekeeping that I wanted to mention is that I have a new phone number. If I haven’t already notified you of the new number (all 3 of you who read this blog), leave a comment or send me an e-mail.

With the changes that I indicated here, I’ve managed to screw up my blog feeds. I don’t know if I’ve gotten them completely fixed - hopefully I will have this solved soon. So that may explain why you haven’t received any recent updates from me. I’ve set up a 301 redirect for the old address, but you should probably update your link to the new address, http://WilliamBragg.com/blog/. Enough of this tech screw-up talk, check out the review.

I’m glad I’m not an artist currently exhibiting at the ‘How Soon Is Now?’ Exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. From Roberta Smith’s review (NYT):

“How Soon Is Now?” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts is almost nothing but symptoms reflecting almost nothing but failings. Yet this show of amateurish and derivative work by 36 emerging artists also says a lot about the competition among art mediums, the latest trickle-down trends in art making and the shortcomings of higher art education. In answer to the show’s catchy title, for many of the artists here, “now” may never come.

The difficulties with artist statements:

Perhaps an overfamiliarity with Conceptual Art and especially the theories it inspired can leave young artists with no sense of how to make an artwork that holds together as an experience. You can sense the lack of connection to either materials or self in their statements, which appear on the wall labels beside the work. They mix overblown, one-size-fits-all artspeak with quite a bit of wishful thinking about their work’s impact, as if they could control the meaning or effect of their work. Different artists claim that their efforts “contend with codes of power, authority, race and class,” “question man-made constructs,” “challenge the anthropological categorizations of early photography” or “reveal the latent power of the public’s collective intelligence.” A few statements manage to locate the art in the vicinity of the artist’s life. “My work focuses on Pakistani-American social and cultural customs and growing up in a working class Muslim family,” one artist says, a reminder that art comes from highly specific contexts. Unfortunately these words accompany a completely generic work involving the hair of the artist and her mother.

Followed by some good advice:

Aspiring artists need to expose themselves to the sheer intensity and variety of art, to learn what they love, what they hate and if they are actually artists at all. New York’s galleries and especially its great museums offer ample opportunity for this kind of self-education, which leads to self-knowledge. Anything is possible when artists set to work knowing they have something they urgently need to say, in a way it hasn’t quite been said before.

I try to comfort myself by alternately declaring that ‘I am no artist, I’m a photographer’, and other times just putting my head under my pillow. Also I absolutely abhor artist statements. The struggle continues, though I’ve had a recent string of very rewarding photographic projects.

The very few readers who come by here regularly will notice that there’s been some changes. (There’s also a new home page and about page.)

I’ve been extremely busy, and don’t want to continue to just post links to other sites. Also I’ve received some pretty disturbing comments on posts about my son. As photography is a big part of my life, I’m changing this blog to more regularly focus on that topic. I’m sure that I’ll continue to post the occasional political content, and possible Red Sox blurb, but for the most part I’m removing the more personal family content. I will be moving that content to another blog that will require a user account and password. I will send out an e-mail notification with the info to many of you. But if you are interested in reading that blog, and don’t think I’ll be contacting you directly, please feel free to contact me.

You may notice that not all the comments transferred over, and I apologize about that. I’m going to see if there is anything that I can do. Also there may be a few other changes to come yet, as well. You don’t have to worry about changing any of your links, as I’ve taken care of that with a 301 redirect.

I hope that these changes don’t cause you not to return, and I’m hoping to attract some more people interested in photography as well. Thanks.