What’s Wrong with the way we judge Competition photography,
and how did it get that way.
Part III


III. Wölfflin’s Categories for Stylistic Change.

Here, at last, is how Wölfflin summarized the changes in art that he claims characterized the transition from the Renaissance culture of the 15^th and 16^th centuries to the Baroque art of the 17^th century. Remind yourselves, as we discuss these, that they are not unqualified descriptions of what is happening, but, rather, generalities. I’ll cite his five categories, now, and then return to several of them with simple examples to show you.

1. The change from the "linear" to the "painterly."
2. The movement from "planar" representation to the use of "recession."
3. A development from "closed" to "open form."
4. A development from "multiplicity" to "unity."
5. A change from "absolute clarity" to "relative clarity" in the subject.

But, before we look at Wölfflin’s set of transitions in detail, I want to be certain you understand at least one of the tools he uses to frame these distinctions. It turns out to be one familiar to photographers; it is the effect of light and by virtue of light, how the "eye" simultaneously informed by visibility, and/or by lack of it, is guided by composition through a scene. As photographers we are well aware of how we create (or how we are told we create) to please the eye or to direct the observer’s eye to suit our purposes. Besides that, we are constantly rendering our three-dimensional reality to fit a two-dimensional presentation space.

But because you and I understand how our art urges the eye to grasp our pictures, we must recognize that it does not necessarily follow that this tool worked the same way for all periods. In Egyptian Art, Medieval Art and through some of the Renaissance period the eye served primarily as a pathway to the intellect or to instruction on doctrines of faith.

Van Eyck, Last Judgement, c. 1420-25 (NY, MMA)

Here is the famous Last Judgment by Jan Van Eyck, at the MET in New York. I’m using it as an example of the Renaissance in the Netherlands and its method of observing and seeing. Everything here is carefully and minutely observed. You can liken its perspective to that produced by a fish-eye lens, or the view you obtain when looking into a spherical mirror – wider and broader than humanly possible – and therefore truer – at least from a divine perspective. All the elements are pulled into one over-riding diagram, a schematic of faith and salvation, which is brought to you visually.

Structurally, this diagram shows who will be saved at the end of all time, and who will be condemned to everlasting hell. At the top, of course, is Christ among the horn-blowing angels of the Apocalypse. Christ is flanked by the Virgin Many on his right, and St. Peter (who represents the Church – I can’t find his key), on the left. Below them are seated the Church Fathers and those who have been saved. Everything above the horizon is order and calm, represented by an intense symmetry and a hierarchical structure where the most important figures are larger. Below the horizon first come the resurrected, on the left those rising from the earth and on the right, from the waters. (Oops! Shame on Jan van Eyck; he put the horizon in the middle.) Then we see Saint Michael who wields the sword as he chases the damned down to Hell. Hell, of course, is dominated by the Devil – here a skeleton. Below him no order remains; now everything is chaos. The damned are torn apart by monsters that would put our most gruesome horror movies to shame.
The work follows a formula that is hundreds of years old, it is a didactic diagram intended to serve as a moral and theological lesson. In its original form it appeared as sculpture meant to reach the illiterate. What is new is its intense realism.

I tend to think of this picture as a metaphor for competition judging. If you obey the rules, all is fine, if you don’t, well, you know what’s next.

In a nutshell, before the 17^th century, religious images were often built schematically, and usually displayed on a plane parallel to the observer. Meaning derived from the "emblematic" nature of the design and subject, and from the use and re-use of traditional elements that had been invested with long-established significances. Objects in images frequently were viewed as having symbolic associations to conventional meanings. This painting is a "conceptualization" – an idea rendered into visible form. It is not "observed" in the normal sense of the term, as much as it is "read."

It is important to keep in mind that when Wölfflin says that this or that picture follows a theory that stems from the action of the eye and that its style follows accordingly, it does not mean that imitating what the eye reveals produces results that are necessarily better than an art that uses other means. Our civilization has a bad habit of assuming that progress is equivalent to improvement.
 
Poussin, Christ Healing Blind at Jericho, 1650, Paris, Louvre

Thus, for example, when Nicolas Poussin, the 17th-century French classical painter ("classical" in this case meaning that he preferred a style with Renaissance attributes), says that the purpose of art is "délectation" (satisfaction or enjoyment), he is not speaking primarily of what the eye brings to us, but what the moral mind creates from observation. His purpose is not so much to delight the eye as it is to delight the mind, and nothing delights his mind more than its ability to convey, through images, the important ancient stoic moral principles to which he subscribed. Using today’s terminology, Poussin, might be called a conceptual artist – or at least one headed in that direction.

You are looking at Poussin’s "Christ Healing the Blind at Jericho. The landscape is obviously constructed and not observed. In fact, nothing is observed. Even the figures have been planned and drawn from wax models. There are no "Baroque" movements here, everything worth knowing takes place parallel to the picture plane – as if it were on a theatrical stage. The figures are actors; their gestures look as if they carry language. The eye is useful, but, by itself, doesn’t create meaning.

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Wölfflin gives the eye a pivotal place in our efforts to comprehend style. He will often use the analogy of what the eye sees as compared to what the hand can feel.

Durer, Study for a figure of Eve, 1504 (left)
Rembrandt. Etching of a Woman Bathing, 1658 (right)

For example, to demonstrate the distinction between the "linear" work of the Renaissance and the so-called "painterly" work of the Baroque, Wölfflin tells us that the linear form tends to be bounded by lines that represent the dividing line between space and matter – thus distinguishing one from another. Theoretically one could trace the contours of a figure drawn in a linear fashion with one’s hands – as in this drawing by the 16^th century German painter Albrecht Durer.

In contrast, a "painterly" work (as in the Rembrandt) is not defined by linear divisions, but rather by patches of light that mold the figure as it is illuminated by light and formed by darkness. The forms we see cannot be sensed by the hand and often do not even represent material substances. Photography’s natural precinct is to be found in the latter example; the former can only be photographically replicated through manipulation.

Man Ray, [two nudes] from "Le nu en photographie," 1937

One of photography’s inveterate inventers, Man Ray, tried his hand (no pun) at this idiom. Here is one of his experiments: White outlined by black, and black by white. Perhaps he was inspired by the renewed interest in the early Renaissance as seen in the Pre-Raphaelite movement of the latter half of the 19^th-century; but whatever the case, he used these techniques for his own purposes. He uses outline, but doesn’t evoke the Renaissance. He intensified the brightness of the female body in one case – relying on line for definition, and allowed it to merge with the black background in the other. The images are erotic

Roman Sculpture from the Republic (1^st C. BC)
(left)

Roman Sculpture (probably 3^rd C. AD – Plotinus) (right)

They say that history repeats itself. We see a similar trend in the development of ancient Roman sculpture. Here are the two Roman portrait busts I introduced before. The earlier example from the Roman Republic – the 1^st century BC – can communicate on the basis of its shape alone – even if we were blind. The hand alone can discover features of the sitter. Early Roman sculptural portraiture derives from the ancient practice of preserving the head of the head of the family after death. In portrait sculpture, accuracy was important, idealization was avoided.

But the later bust, from the third century AD, contemporary with the rise of late empire "mystery" cults (including Christianity) that crafted its art to transcend the life of experience, eschews realism. The work is presumed to represent Plotinus one such cult leader. He was known to be opposed to portraiture because he believed the human was just a copy of a copy of the soul. (For those who studied philosophy, you’ll note the similarity to Platonic thought -- hence "Plotinus".) This work is expressive rather than representational since it develops its expression by the fall of the light over the carved surface of the stone. The stone just acts as a means of making light reveal the sculpture.

This prepares us to confront an issue of significance to judging photographic contests. If you were asked to judge the Early Roman and the Later Roman pieces and you were an admirer of the tradition of Roman Realism in which people were not idealized, the head of Plotinus would probably seem to you to signify a decadence of the sculptural tradition, i.e. we are past the apogee of Roman creativity. You would probably think the Plotinus head was poorly formed, unnaturally elongated, and sculpted without grace. The eyes, in particular, seem not to acknowledge earthly subjects; they glance heavenward and appear prepossessed by spiritual matters.

On the other hand, if you were a spiritually motivated late Roman, you might look upon the earlier piece as without spirit, and overly involved with the defects of material realities, perhaps excessively involved with the corporeality of the body, and of the world itself. (He does look as if he has taken his punches.) In either case, you would see these works through your prejudices and biases – or, more politely, through your "subjectivity." Subjectivity is the bane of judging – nearly impossible to vanquish. The best judges know their opinions are subjective and inform the audience when the issue arises.

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Durer, Study for a figure of Eve, 1504 (left)

Rembrandt. Etching of a Woman Bathing, 1658 (right)

The two drawings before us signify differing perspectives. The former attempts to represent the subject in a form that precedes observation: as it is – as we know it to be – or as we might imagine it to be – in a word – idealized. Philosophers call this a priori knowledge, which, for us means without taking into account what we learn from light as a force that reveals.
On the other hand, Rembrandt’s image only discloses what the light permits. The object is known by its perception. We borrow again from the philosophers and call this kind of knowledge a posteriori, which generally means to begin reasoning from observed facts, but here it is adapted to explain how we get our knowledge of the visual world. In short, when speaking of the differences between these two images our knowledge has changed; in the Rembrandt what he drew came from observation – residing within the confines of human perception.

Between the Renaissance and the Baroque period the way humans came to understand their world moved from the "objective" to the "subjective." In this case "objective" means that it was created by "thought" without visual verification – such as Durer’s drawing of Eve. Nobody ever saw Eve, but, overlooking the mythic factor, they all have a good idea of what she looked like. As beautiful as Durer’s Eve appears, she is a "conceptualization" – reinvented to conform to the contemporary style.
Later on, in the 17^th Century, what we actually see is becoming to be more important than what we knew through belief. This is the basis of the scientific method.

Wölfflin claims that the linear style speaks of security while the "painterly" style offers no firm repose and no secure reality. The visible world is a changeable one.

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What happened between the 15^th and 17^th century to shake the western world off its foundation? Briefly: One earth-shattering event, of course, was the discovery of the New World, another was acknowledgment of the soundness of the Copernican (d. 1543) vision of the solar system, which deposed the Earth (i.e. Man) from the center of our universe and established the heliocentric model; but, perhaps the most unsettling of all was the Reformation, in which long-held religious beliefs and the authorities that promulgated them were openly questioned. What was left to trust? Only what you experienced yourself.

Trust in what you perceived began a progression in the development of thought and observation. Knowledge became "subjective," many truths, eventually were accepted as "relative." In the visual arts, this process ultimately led all the way to the invention of Impressionism as a means of representation – and for that matter, concurrently, to the invention of photography, which wholly depends upon the action of light to produce images. We’ll come back to this.

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Claude Lorraine, Port Scene, 1639

Wölfflin says that planar presentations gave way to recessional formulas.

It is a truism in "rule-based" amateur photography that "picturesque" interpretations of reality are more exciting, and more dynamic, than fact-filled images. This is clearly obvious in the representation of architecture. Photographic practitioners are encouraged not to depict flat frontal views of façades, but rather images of buildings occupying and receding (i.e. moving) into space (p.25). The difference is often said to be one between "Being" and "Becoming." "Being" is static; "Becoming" is dynamic.

Here is Wölfflin’s own description:

"Everyone knows that, of the possible aspects of a building, the front view is the least picturesque: here the thing and its appearance fully coincide. But as soon as foreshortening comes in, the appearance separates from the thing, the picture-form becomes different from the object-form, and we speak of a picturesque movement-effect. Certainly, in such a picturesque movement-effect, recession plays an essential part in the impression—the building moves away from us. The visual fact, however, is that in this case objective distinctness retreats behind an appearance in which outline and surfaces have separated from the pure form of the thing. It has not become unrecognizable, but a right angle is no longer a right angle, and the parallel lines have lost their parallelism. [In this] a totally independent play of forms is developed which is the more enjoyable …"

Fratelli Alinari, Portico degli Uffizi et il Palazzo Vecchio, ca. 1860

You feel this dynamism in both the Port Scene by the French 17^th Century painter Claude Lorraine and in this image of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence taken by the Fratelli Alinari. The Alinari Brothers is a photographic image vendor specializing in Italian art. This photographic image was taken around 1860. They are still in business.

Claude Lorraine, Port Scene, 1639

I’ll bet everyone in this room would be glad give their right eye to have taken a picture of the scene Claude Lorraine painted. It gets all of our "rules" just about right; but more importantly, it is exciting, romantic and mysterious – rules can’t ask for these things. And to think that Claude made his early living as a pastry chef. The only thing is that I doubt that this view ever existed in reality. What we see is an elaborate set design, a fabrication. Vaguely ancient, it is stimulating and evocative, certainly; but not real. Until photographers had Photoshop, such illusions were difficult to produce photographically.

Note that the Claude does not give us a symmetrical view; rather, we watch the port buildings diminish into infinity -- in to the sun. In this way it is an unbalanced and therefore dynamic composition, unlike the photograph of the Palazzo Vecchio, above which is more closely related to the next image. The Alinari began by documenting the visual history of Florence; their purpose was not to take romantic views but to record information. For this reason it relates to the next image which uses pseudo archaeological evidence to construct a stage set.

Sebastiano Serlio – Theater set. ca 1540

My comparison to the Claude is an ideal set design published by Sebastiano Serlio, a mid-16^th century Italian architect. He also creates recession; but as a set, it is just a backdrop; it cannot be penetrated. If this were real, and not just a proposal, all the activity would occur on the stage directly in front of the audience – just the way Leonardo’s famous "Last Supper" uses a recessional backdrop. Leonardo’s table is parallel to the observer.

Leonardo da Vinci. Last Supper, Milan. 1498

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We can discuss the same kind of comparison in portraiture:

The Holbein image from the mid 16^th century is flat and diagrammatic. The flat plane of the image keeps the viewer away. She is almost a playing card.

In contrast, the Rembrandt uses lead-in diagonals and creates space. Saskia, Rembrandt’s wife, looks out of the space directly into the viewer’s eyes, and in that way approaches to offer a flower. Even more interestingly, she is offering her flower (pun intended) to the painter. Through Saskia, Rembrandt paints himself into the picture – a very photographic enterprise.

These two comparisons represent Wölfflin’s concept of the planar versus recession. They are familiar to photographers who are taught to favor recession in their photos, the use of lead-in diagonals, communication between sitters, and "the rule of thirds," which encourages movement into and out of the depth of the picture. These are all typical formulas that have frequently been used (knowingly or not) by Baroque painters. I won’t belabor the point, except to remind you that Rembrandt is intermingling the fictive space within the painting with the real space he occupies as a painter, reminiscent, you’ll remember of Lee Friedlander’s little shadow-play we saw earlier.
Lee Friedlander [shadow play]

Another attribute of change that Wölfflin described (and the last I’ll discuss here) is of special interest to photographers. This is the movement from "absolute" to "relative" clarity of the subject.

Bronzino, Elinora of Toledo

The Bronzino we saw earlier could be taken to represent the Renaissance ideal of perfect clarity. It exists as if air carries no substance, and no lack of light or focus has the power to obscure the subject.

Velázquez’ Infanta Marguerite Therese (right)

The Velázquez we used in comparison is different. Remember how he just summarizes the details of the dress, drawing them more precisely and more stridently the closer he gets to his subject’s face.

Baroque artists use composition and changes in, let’s get ahead of ourselves and call it "focus" to direct attention to a single subject. Just as the rule-book suggests we do in photography. The term used to describe the way Baroque painters blur precise details to mute their effect and deflect the eye’s attention, derives from the German term for "like a painter" (malerisch). In English we say "painterly," a term invented by the English translators of Wölfflin’s book. Let’s look at a great "painterly" work.

Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, c.1630

Perhaps there is no greater master of this technique than the 17^th Century Dutch painter Frans Hals. He frequently modulated his brush strokes to direct the viewer’s attention. For a long time people thought Hals was a drunkard who painted too quickly. And that was taken as a suitable explanation for his so-called "sloppy" brush techniques. Fact is, his "painterly" efforts were put down with great care.

But look at the dynamic diagonal composition. The tankard tacking down the lower right, Malle Babbe (The Witch of Haarlem) is in the upper center grinning to the lower left, and the owl in the top right – just barely a sketch of an owl, so not to grab your attention without being able to releasing it – and so closes off the composition and returns the viewer back to the main subject. Furthermore, and most important for us, look at how the "sloppy" handling of the folds of Malle Babbe’s right sleeve keeps the eye agitated and doesn’t allow it to come to rest. The dynamic gesture of Malle Babe is answered in Hals’ "broken-X" composition. We don’t frequently find this kind of dynamic emotional gesture during the Renaissance. The language of 17^th-Century painting is not so different from what we learn as photographers. In fact, Hals makes "action" one of his key themes.

Julia Margaret Cameron. Study for the Cenci – 1868

As a photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron’s primary goal was to create scenes of religious content. The "selective focus" (also called "differential focus") you see in this study and other works was chosen to increase the spirituality or feeling of her subjects – not to render facts. You may not be surprised to learn that before she began using photography she spent time studying the paintings of the Old Masters.

In her motive we see a relation to the Late Roman head of Plotinus where form and spirituality are mingled.

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We can continue in this manner and scrutinize the remaining types of changes that Wölfflin identifies as distinguishing the differences between Renaissance and Baroque visual creation, in doing so we will arrive at observations similar to the above.

Vermeer. Soldier and Young Girl. Plus detail. (Frick Coll.)

The last painting I’m going to show you is by Johannes Vermeer, the 17^th Century Dutch painter who lived and worked in Delft. He is especially significant in the present context because he painted with what might today really be called "selective focus." Recently it has been noticed that his highly luminous reflective points are not as sharp as the eye might see them in reality, but are soft and indistinct.


Compared to the "painterly" Baroque painters, his brushwork is fine and nearly invisible. These "points" of his are purposefully softened and have been compared to the "circles of confusion" formed by poor optics and by spectral points out of perfect focus. Delft was a center of the optical industry in Holland, Leeuwenhoek, said to be the inventor of the microscope, was the executer of Vermeer’s estate. With these facts and observations in mind, scientists have begun to analyze Vermeer’s perspectival system, and have conjectured that at least some of his paintings must have been conceived with the help of a camera obscura – they appear to have been seen through a lens.

I can’t explain Vermeer’s use of this device to you technically, but if it is true what they say, we have established a link between the optics of Vermeer’s generation, and how optics may have helped fulfill the goals Vermeer inherited as a 17^th-century painter. It is only a short trip of the imagination that leads from the Baroque style, to the Camera Obscura, and from the Camera Obscura to sets of guidelines given to nascent photographers.

Incidentally, it was the contemporary painter David Hockney, who seems to have been the first to bring Vermeer’s use of the camera obscura to the public’s attention.

I’m not going to show examples of the remaining stylistic trends that Wölfflin maps as leading to the Baroque. If we follow Wölfflin in the same spirit as I have described above, watching the transition from "closed to open form" or "the development from multiplicity to unity" we will discover trends that also may have influenced the guidelines adopted by photographers and ported to amateur photographic competition. So, instead, let’s conclude:

IV. Conclusion:

According to Wölfflin, the primary difference between the idealized style of the Renaissance and the subjective style of the following period lies in how visual perception is rendered. In the 17^th century the viewer is brought into the composition. And the resulting intimacy, of course, is a significant attribute of photographic picture-taking. When our judges ask for a glint of light in the eye of a subject, they often are asking for confirmation that there is communication between photographer and subject.

While modern painters may imagine themselves in places where they are not, or may paint "en plein aire," before their subjects, landscape photographers have to place their cameras in front of their subjects. Unlike painters, the first photographers were wedded to the worlds they depict. That is, until the modern era.

It seems to me, that many of the rules upon which our judges have come to espouse derive from an unquestioned reception of Baroque painting methods and goals – acceptance to the extent that they believe that earlier methodologies, such as what was practiced during the Renaissance, needed to be abandoned. In the visual arts, this insistence on conformity set the stage for a wide variety of revolts – from Cubism, to Dada and Surrealism, and even to modern abstraction.

In the beginning, however, obeying the rules served two key functions. The first was to sanction how, as in contemporary pre-modern fine-arts, photography, too, rendered the three-dimensional world on to a flat plane. The second may be called "political." By turning the photograph into an object complete and whole unto itself, photography, it was hoped, could compete with painting as a fine art. What this suggests is that judges educated under the force of the rule-system, could find cause to oppose works that derived from other periods or that used other styles, or which might just imply extension beyond the frame – most manifestly of the photojournalistic kind.

"Beyond the frame" doesn’t just mean that the image is not bounded by the frame, but also that the work in itself is incomplete and needs to convey information in the form of a title or caption. Good photojournalism typically will not make aesthetics a requirement. Many photojournalists have been fired for using Photoshop. Photojournalism is about information. I’ve heard it said that no photograph can be successful without a caption – a swipe at fine art photography. Thus, those who deny this tenet seem to believe that what appears in the photographic frame should make textual explanations unnecessary or redundant -- a living remnant of the "New Criticism" of the 1940s through the 1960s.

Robert Capa: Death in Spain, 1937 and detail

Here is Robert Capa’s famous photo of a Soldier receiving a fatal bullet during the Spanish Civil War. Would you believe it if I told you that the photo-editors originally rejected this photo because Capa carelessly merged the soldier’s shoe and gun with the frame, because the sky was too empty, and the subject was squeezed into one corner of the photo, and, of course, because there was no glint of a reflection in the victim’s eye? Clearly, this picture exists outside of the "rules." In this manner, it is not unique.

To serve these ends our conventional guidelines also mitigate against accepting and approving of compositions and structures revealing pre-Baroque or Renaissance tendencies. Thus, in the photographic tradition under which we compete, the conceptualization of subject matter (or making subjects out of abstract ideas) is discouraged, while pictorial visual effects are encouraged. That’s why during this talk you’ve seen so few photographs taken in the Renaissance spirit.

Behind all this is the obligation that in his pictures the photographer must control the observer’s attention and not allow it to get lost in so-called unimportant details or to leave the frame altogether. Do we distrust our viewers; do we expect their attention to wander aimlessly?

It is easy to see why our guidelines stress certain compositional formulae and index a variety of picture-making virtues and sins: lead-lines, original viewpoints, avoidance of allowing the frame to cut into a subject (mergers) or cutting off heads and feet, multiple subjects, or no subject at all. These devices and many others are predicated upon the presumption that they are the necessary attributes of images made through the course of rendering what the camera sees. Indeed, that is why many camera clubs require that competition images be initiated through a conventional camera lens and not born from scanners, drawings or Photoshop – but this is now changing. We presume we are documenting or discovering not just a three-dimensional world full of change, but one that can be represented in a four-square environment or, as some people put it: "What you see when you are looking at the world through the viewfinder."

But the world is not the same as it once was. While photography still exists to render what the camera sees, more and more photographers are using their images for conceptual purposes.
Accordingly, some clubs include a competition category we know as "Open Mind," a title that serves as a plea to accept images that may not necessarily be based upon the "visual rendition" principle I have been describing. At WPS our Open Mind competition is at least 25 years old. In it we see increasing evidence that the power of "three-dimensional rendition" is on the wane. Abstractions (from reality) and Conceptualizations or constructions (from the mind) are not uncommon. Manipulations of images that forgo the effects of light, the three-dimensionality of place or the stability of our physical environment are all acceptable. Open Mind, as it was once defined to me by one of its great practitioners, is a place where the photographer can create his own alternate world, which I take as code for images that depart from or downright reject the "3-D rendition" principle. That’s not to say that intriguing variations on traditional themes and methods do not appear. Rather, Open Mind is a welcoming place for manipulated images and for people who refuse to suffer the claustrophobia of pictorial photography.

Judges frequently have a difficult time assessing our Open Mind compositions. Are they to employ the standards they use for traditional pictorial works? Or are other methodologies available to them? Our instructions to judges make it clear that so-called "PSA rules" need not be followed, but for Open Mind they should rely on their good sense and aesthetic instinct. That’s the loop-hole: Using "aesthetic instinct" is an invitation to bring back the traditional rules for judging – often the only criteria judges have at their disposal.

More troublesome are those images placed in the traditional "pictorial" or illustrative competition categories that, as shown earlier, may employ stylistic features that do not belong to the rule-based pictorial tradition we have been discussing, but that may derive from just about anything else – from ancient imagery, to ethnic imagery, to abstraction, to photojournalism – even to lens-aberration.

The formulas for rendering what we can see with the native eye have served us well, and still do; but our world has changed, new demands are being made on the arts as they are being asked to stand for new values for new times. In many arenas conceptualization and "concept art" have replaced what I’ve been calling "pictorial rendition," and in some photographic venues there is a purposeful reaction to the fine photographic print, produced to look like a work of art – hence unreal, hence, on its face, fictional. The style of accurate documentation (true or not) mimics the style of photojournalism.

Cindy Sherman [film still]

I depart with this question. Are our amateur photographic societies to remain mired in the ways of the past, or should we attempt to adapt to reflect the changing values of our protean culture? In my view, adaptation is inevitable. But, if we resist and continue to judge our works primarily by the old standards – by formulas that mitigate against accepting new emerging values – such a change will remain distant and we will develop into quaint but irrelevant antiques. Frankly, I don’t think that will ever occur; evolving is just too much fun to resist for very long.

END

A brief biography of Robert A. Baron

Robert Baron began his academic career teaching primarily in the area of Renaissance and Baroque art history. Subsequently, he served as a computer consultant and systems analyst to museums for art-historical image cataloguing and collections management. Later he served as project manager for a program that investigated issues concerning the creation of a repository of copyright free images for scholars to use in teaching and academic publishing. At the same time, for five years Robert sat as chair of the College Art Association’s Committee on Intellectual Property. Most of his publications and presentations concern the academic use of copyrighted materials. Forthcoming is an article about how metaphor is being used to frame contemporary debates on intellectual property. It will appear in the Art and Museum Law Journal of the Cooley School of Law. Robert is also the author of a popular website which, using parody, explores why and how the Mona Lisa became a popular icon of contemporary culture. Currently Robert is a member of the Westchester Photographic Society, edits its newsletter, and serves on its board of directors. His website, which contains materials on all of the above, among other things, also includes his WPS competition photographs, which may be accessed through www.studiolo.org/index.htm.

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