What Photography Is by James Elkins

I enjoyed this book so much more after he stopped rambling about Camera Lucida and just started writing his thoughts.

Some Quotes:

It is important not to forget the billion of photographs that aren't saved or printed. They are the population of photography, just as a count of living things shows bacteria are incomprehensibly more numerous than the kind of life we end up noticing. -p.95

I selected them, and brought they into this book, they are "found photography": they aren't quite art, but they are also no longer what they once were. -p.101

I see these people's lives as if they are covered with an old veil: they feel dank. Nostalgia self is stale, and this is second-hand nostalgia. A breath of someone else's life, breathed out into my mouth. -p.107

That searching for memories in photographs was therefore a flash solace, in which I had fooled myself into thinking that my own memories, which are naturally growing fainter and more inaccurate with each passing day, are not ruined and ultimately erased by the force of the particular faces captured in photographs, but that somehow, paradoxically, those memories could actually be strengthened by reviewing those same images. But photographs of people I know and love are actually a poison to memory, because they remain strong while my memories weaken. The more often I look at a photograph of someone I loved who is no longer alive, the more my own faltering memory tries to accommodate itself to the unchanging images, accurate by distorting itself, harming itself, conforming to what they photograph continues to present, until my memory is nothing but a tattered shadow clinging to the photograph. - p. 114-115

Why Art Cannot Be Taught by James Elkins

I agree with a lot of things that were said in this book. He reinforced some of my thoughts about what types of media are acceptable to educational institutions. My thought is that they are unacceptable because white men predominately controlled the higher education system and they had no frame of reference for art outside of their mediums. So textiles, ceramics, etc. are usually looked down on as forms of art since they can also be practical.

A few Quotes:

What I want to stress here is not how we are connected to the past but how strongly we are disconnected. For practical purposes current art instruction doesn't involved a fixed curriculum, a hierarchy of genres, a sequence of courses, a coherent body of knowledge, or a unified theory or practice. - p.38

Behind this assumption is the idea that what artists do is different in kind from what electrical engineers or physicists do: in theory everyone can understand art, but only some people can understand engineering or physics. And in the end, everyone needs art, while only some people could be said to need the expertise of an electrical engineer or a physics. Art is ideally or potentially universal: it has to do with the people's feeling an dinner lives, and so it isn't a specialty known only to a few individuals. - p.63

Artists are educated differently, typically with fewer non-art subjects, and that contributes to the fact that artists make art that expresses their own minority subculture and not the culture as a whole. -p.64

p. 73-78 are especially good.

They all boil down to one central problem, which has been with us since the early Renaissance: the notion that the crafts are not as important as the arts.      
Our indecision about crafts, decoration, and design suggests that it's a deep-seated inequality, built into Western culture: we just feel it is true that chairs have a different value from paintings. - p.83

Artist Statement

Anthotype is an early photographic process, which uses natural dyes and extended sun exposure to create photographic images. The first anthotype prints were made in 1842 as an experiment to invent color photography. As an artist, I am drawn to this Victorian process, because it is a ecologically and environmentally sound method of photography.  In order to preserve knowledge of the anthotype process and make it more available to the photographic community, I have documented my experiments with the medium and detailed the creative process.

My present body of work combines anthotype onto textiles, in the form of a quilt. By creating the quilt, I’m marking time, and specifically this time in our life with a small child, while my husband and I both have jobs. Life is not particularly easy, nor is it impossible, but it is beautiful.

I am exploring our human, and specifically female, connection to landscape and nature through the imagery I create and the dye sources I employ.  With the entirety of this work I’m making connections between natural dyes and nature, quilting and female identity, and feminine knowledge transfer through shared techniques and traditions. The female lineage of quilting forms the roots of this body of work, and illustrates the knowledge transferred through women over time, both through craft and as a tangible object by representation of multi-generational female experience.  

This work also challenges the basic photographic principles of light and time since anthotype is both created and destroyed by light. All photographic processes require light to create their imagery. Most are light safe and permanent, but anthotype is not. Anothtype is a truer representation of time, because it isn’t permanent, it changes over time just like the original image source in photography. Anthotype is closer to reality than traditional photography.

All of these processes are deeply seeded at the core of who I am. The history of natural dyes, photography, and quilting are vast and deep with significant artistic, gender, and cultural importance. This quilt provides a marker of the physical landscape we currently live in for my daughter and myself. Combining anthotype and quilting allow me to express my personal connection to place as well as my personal history with the medium.