Who is the serious one here ?

 

 

 

KP: So, are you starting to feel like a professional blogger yet?

KP2: Shut up.

........

 

It is back to the drawing board as they seem to say. It is coming back to the task at hand. Difficult questions need to be answered yet again and again. Who is the amateur, who is the professional? Who the genius is will not be discussed as most of the lecturers before, similar to the lecturer of the today's lunch talk, Paolo Woods, decided to dismiss.

 

Like the lecturers before him, Paolo Woods questioned at one point if we have already created too much images that we don't know what to do with.

 

" Taking photos like the Japanese and we all have become Japanese".

"The time today is the time off the overload".

"We have a lot more photos of elephants then we have elephants".

"What we need, is it out there already?"

 

Taking part in a workshop last year during the Shanghai Biennale the question of the overload came up as well. One of the curators of the exhibition, Boris Groys, suggested that the new role of an artist is not to create anymore but to document what has been done so far. On the other hand today,  Paolo Woods suggested not the stopping of the works produced but different approach to this creation, point of view, thought and role of the work. "The main role of the photography today is recognition".

 

But what about the question of the professional, amateur position in the art. It was great to see that at one point , while talking about  " this punk" Claude Baechtold, Paolo Woods recognized how much he did learn from somebody whom he thought to be a complete amateur when they met and started working together ten years ago. "I am the photographer. I am the serious one here."  How serious can we take ourselves sometimes?

 

The talk went on and questions about the use of text were raised as well. It was really interesting to hear that as somebody who uses text in his works, he considers text and photography as different entities to each other. To him, one photo is not the same as thousand words.

 

But what in the end  left  a mark for me today is what happened after the talk while Paolo Wood was giving an interview. He was asked by a photographer to pose for the profile photo and both felt uncomfortable in the roles that they had at that time. It was difficult for the one in front of the lance as well as the other behind the lance. One was nervious because he must have felt like an amateur while the other must have felt purely as an object. For a second or so maybe without the feel of possessing the control. It made me laugh when Paolo Woods was directed to cross his arms in a particular manner when all in fact had to be natural.

 

So what is it that we are creating today? What do we need to spit out, as a cliché,  so that we can start a new something?