Award season in the photo biz in drawing to a close. Applied Arts, PDN and
American Photography 24 are the three I entered this year. I submitted just about
the same work to all three.

The juries have met and the results are in.

I’m a 2-time loser but the one I really wanted came through. I had work selected for
inclusion on the American Photography 24 web site. (Mark Heflin, the big cheeze at
American Photography, tells me in his e-mail that there were over 9000 entries and
they picked 201 for the web site.)

But that’s not my point. Here’s the point:

The work I submitted to all three competitions was about the same. Only one jury
gave it the thumbs up.

A similar thing happened a while back. I had done a shoot for Report on Business
magazine.

The work won a National Magazine Award for Words and Pictures. I submitted the
same spreads to the local ADA Awards and didn’t hear a peep. I guess the local folks
thought that the shots weren’t that good.

The thing I take away from this is that there’s no accounting for taste. What one group
of people thinks is swell, another might think is shite. Go figger.

I tell myself in situations like this is: “If you believe them when they say you’re good,
you have to believe them when they say you’re bad”. So what I choose to do is to not
really believe any of it. I just try to keep on doing my thing and let the chips fall where
they may. Stay strong.

AND, IN A SIMILAR VEIN…..

Last Monday Joerg Colberg featured me in his very popular and highly influential fine art
photoblog, Conscientious. I thank him for his support.

He mentions that my personal portfolios contain quite a few interesting shots and goes on
to say that he’s somewhat torn about USER…..because of the subject matter. He’s not sure
whether turning drug users into a fine-art photography fad is going to help them too much.

I respect what Joerg is doing way too much to pick a fight with him about that. I give him
props for featuring me despite his reservations about that specific body of work. In my
books that makes him a standup dude. Righteous.

It strikes me, though, that there are similarities here between Joerge’s take on certain subject
matter and the jury process I talk about above. You go out, produce work, put it out there to
be seen and judged, people react. Some say “Yes”, others say “No”. And you know what…..I’m
fine with that.

The reason I do personal projects is because they get me out of the house, occupy my time and
I get to meet people and learn. I do’ do it to change the world….I’m way too cynical to think
I ever could. And I know that i’s impossible to follow the work around to defend it, define it,
deny it, deconstruct it or delete it.

So, like I say above (and I do like repeating myself): I just try to keep on doing my thing and
let the chips fall where they may. Stay strong.

Anyway…..

I got quite a few e-mails because of all the extra visits to my site and blog that his mention attracted
Here’s a snippet of an e-mail from Thomas Dashuber from Germany:

“When I looked at your work yesterday I first thought you are European. Well composed. Nice lighting
and strange humour. Very unamerican. But then I saw you are Canadian - explained things!”

ADDED SUNDAY NITE:

Just found this response to the Conscientious aspects of this post. FWIW. I hope the dialogue
will continue……