I have held my reactions to Assembly: Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern California (curated by “the curatorial team of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art”) until last in my Fotofest posts because it is a show that troubles me on quite a few levels and I wanted time to think about it. I came to realize that it was not the work included in the show that bothered me, but the show as an extension of what is now termed “curatorial practice.”

I may as well get the title out of the way first by simply asking, “’Emerging’ from what?” This is a picky beginning, I know, but from a curatorial perspective it is important since the use of the term implies the curators are touting their ability to foretell the future. It is a sensibility born more from a marketing than an institutional perspective. The museum imprimatur and curatorial gravitas attached to this show advances the work of these eight artists as embodying the fully realized expressions of the direction(s) of photography in Southern California. Because of who they are, and where they work, the curatorial team cannot run away from the implication that their selections explicitly annoint these artists and the work they are creating as both important and worthy of watching as it matures. My most troubling question, therefore, is that as museum curators, at what point is the “team” blatantly contributing to the directions of artistic production instead of thoughtfully commenting upon them?

Next, I am troubled by the exhibition’s curatorial strategy that seems to stem from the “team’s” contention that the most intellectually challenging debates surrounding the making of art in Southern California are being held in the graduate art programs that ring the region. While their supposition may be true to the extent that this is where one might easily access such conversations, the LACMA curators make the fatal assumption that those between whom these discussions are being held (i.e. the recent graduate students who populate this show) have sufficient maturity, visual confidence, and intellectual prowess to make work that embodies and extends these ideas. Unfortunately, the curatorial selections for the exhibition prove this not to be the case. The exhibition is riddled with a student sensibility…even to the point of including thesis show work. Glimmers of insight seem too quickly doused by inclusions that at some turns are pedantic and at others merely petulant.

By putting this work forward in the context of an internationally attended festival showcasing contemporary U.S. photowork, the curators have rendered no service to their audience…or to their artists. As a baby museum curator I was rightly counseled that graduate work was not to be mined for collection or exhibition since there are just too many variables that enter into the creative mix. A graduate student’s creative process is one that is bolstered by artificial supports and shaped by the constant interjections of a resident creative community. I have learned that an artist’s true voice and work will only begin to coalesce after the scaffolding of a graduate program have been kicked away and a few projects have come and gone. It is then that the real work of being an artist begins. As “Team LACMA’s” efforts at Fotofest attest, a curator forgets this at his/her peril.