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.

This is the first Fotofest at which I have been able to take in all of the exhibitions with the attention and seriousness that they deserve. Previously, I have been a portfolio reviewer at the Meeting Place and by the time the day was over and we were trooped over for an opening of an exhibition, I couldn’t approach the show with a critical eye if my life depended on it. Working the Meeting Place on a more ad hoc basis this year has let me really look at the festival’s exhibition program, and suffice to say that the experience has been a revelation.

Natasha Egan from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago has mounted a wonderfully cohesive show at the Winter Street Studios: The Road to Nowhere? With a palpable sense of curatorial restraint, Natasha offers a show that challenges and rewards. She has chosen work that is pointed without being didactic, metaphoric without being obtuse, and accessible without being easy. If there were only one reason to see the show it would surely be the haunting and melancholy 3-channel video piece by Greg Stimac that features three white Ford Mustangs aggressively confronting the viewer with horns blaring until one by one, as batteries drain, the horns weaken and lapse into silence.

Medianation: Performing for the Screen has a lot to overcome: it is split between 3 venues, it is W-A-A-AY out there conceptually (by traditional Fotofest standards), and it is filled with artists whose last inclination is to be known as a photographer. In spite of these factors—or in some cases because of them—the show is smart, visually savvy, and a refreshing departure for this festival. Gilbert Vacario, curator at the Des Moines Art Center has pulled together a group of works that are elegant, gritty, thoughtful, whimsical, political and personal, and, somehow they coalesce into a show that is mostly rewarding, and always provocative. This is a show that needs to be experienced as if a single-day pilgrimage going from venue to venue. Somehow, driving, time, and distance become part of the fabric of the exhibition and contribute to the overall experience in a substantive way. Trust me…take the trek.

Whatever was Splendid: New American Photographs is housed at Fotofest’s Headquarters and curated by Aaron Schuman, founder of SeeSaw Magazine. While more uneven than the other two shows, it showcases well known work by Hank Willis Thomas and Todd Hido; Greg Stimac is again represented in this show with video and still work; but, the stand-out of this group effort is certainly the video piece Killcam (2008) by Richard Mosse which supports his still work. Mosse’s video features scenes of wounded vets from the current Iraqi/Afghan war playing Iraqi war-themed video games interspersed with actual targeted kill documentations from the same war. The effect is arresting, troubling, and incredibly effective.

Bravo, Wendy and Fred, for taking the risk of reinvigorating the festival with new voices, diverse sensibilities, and expanding parameters! Even when the results are not completely resolved, the conversations and ideas you have nurtured are mightily appreciated.