LOOK3 (2013 observations-1)

LOOK3 2013 was a better balance of art photography and journalistic photography than last years mix.

Of course there are many labels used in photography and most are misleading and limiting at best but that was my impression.

One is not better than another it just seemed a little more 50/50 this year. I enjoy most forms of photography and consider it all good grist for the mill. I will attend and did attend most insight interviews regardless of labels. In fact I really appreciate the more mixed bag LOOK3 had for us this year.

What it seems you won't find at the LOOK3 insight type events are any primarily commercial photographers. What I mean here is all of the photographers have the love of making images in common first and generally have to find money to support the work or the life of the photographer.  This is different than photographers who get paid to make images that have a direct bearing on things such as sales as apposed to say history, anthropology and so on.

I found the print shows overall more formally beautiful last year than this, maybe this was content related.

For my dollar I would have loved seeing more Gregory Crewdson prints (only 2 color pieces shown) lots of wall space was devoted to the technical things behind the images. It isn't that was not interesting to me, but I would prefer to read about it in a book or another form and seen the wall space used for more images. Although in the smaller room at Second Street Gallery there were a number of recent b&w prints, from his latest body of work. While on Crewdson, I have been aware of his work for sometime and would of liked to have a book of his. It seems to me when he first came to some prominence I was heavily into studying various painters. So given this opportunity (despite my lean financial [on sabbatical] lifestyle) I purchased books yet again at a LOOK3 event.