“Early Blossoms, Wooded Island, Jackson Pk.,” by Charles Cushman. Via the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection at Indiana University.
Make 14,000 images from any photographer available and your perspective on their work will change drastically. If Cushman’s work would have been tightly edited and only distributed as a book, he’d probably be praised as a pioneer of color photography.
I think that’s a fairly accurate comment about Cushman, and I think it applies as well to quite a lot of lay photographers’ flickr streams, and for much the same reason.
Part of what leads to the consternation some folks feel regarding flickr as opposed to other venues for photography is that most flickr users do not treat flickr as a form of publishing in the same sense as a photobook or a gallery show — it’s a lot more like someone hanging up their all work prints and contact sheets to dry in their front yard. Those prints and contact sheets have not yet become part of a finished sequence of photographs that could be fairly compared to the published body of work of a well-known photographer. For this reason, comparisons of this kind are inapt.
However, while it’s true that a very good edit could create a pioneering Cushman, it’s also true that a different edit would create a lousy Cushman, or a clumsy Cushman, or a merely lecherous Cushman. One could easily make five or six different edits (maybe more) and persuade a viewer that they were the work of five or six different photographers. One could create whole false histories out of an archive like this.
I wonder what the world would have made of the archive of someone like Winogrand if he had never published work during his life time…
