In the Quarry

Not so long ago this was a mountain just outside town . Now, most of it is a new motorway which is due to open next Monday. I think I would rather have the mountain.

.......... And now for the matter which has been perplexing some of you. What was the question I posed at the Royal Hibernian Society last night? Well, firstly a bit of a preamble. The first photo we were introduced to turned out not to have been a photo made by the "artist"at all, but as she explained herself, a still, lifted from a CCTV installed in an hotel. This was part of a body of work about the behaviour of hotel staff. Immediately my blood pressure began to rise. (a) This wasn't actually a photograph at all in the normally accepted sense of that term (b) The young female artist, not long graduated from Art college I would guess, admitted that although exhibited as her work it had been lifted from an automatic CCTV camera (c) The phrase "Body of Work" rankled with me. She wasn't old enough nor dead enough to have left to posterity a body of work.

What followed also got right up my nose. Over the course of the next 10 minutes or so, the "Body of Work"phrase was used at least another six times by Ms.Stein, a photographer I have always admired greatly. She also suggested that artists should really submit work in both landscape and portrait formats so that the panel could better ascertain the merits of that artist's Body of Work.
So, I asked whether the criteria for hanging in the gallery was based on the single image or on the Body of Work. I would have thought that every picture hung on the wall should do so on its own merit without reference to anything else the artist may or may not have ever produced. I never got what I consider to be an adequate answer although I did receive some considerable waffle, some negativity (again from a young recently graduated female) and some support too from males of my own vintage. The really amusing thing was that this Body of Work mantra was used by almost every artist photographer in speaking about their work and it became a great matter of tittering and giggling throughout the group of about 50 people. One woman approached me late in the evening and mentioned that I had opened a very stimulating debate.
In a party of yes men I always tend to rebel. I do not believe in waffle.