Jock Sturges Comments on gerryyaum.com

Dear Gerry,

I went through you site at speed a while back and then again yesterday.Sorry not to have replied sooner but we have been crazy busy this last little while.

The work is strong and in some instances, very strong -- stark and on balance very sad.

You run the camera well and reveal yourself in the work as extremely charismatic to have persuaded such a tatterdemalion host of beings to allow you to pinion them thus.

So. On the constructive criticism side of the coin I will opine that you are perhaps a shade less kind than I might like in using light and ground as harshly as you do. The plight of these beings is pretty bleak already. The eyes and the bruises give us that as does our imagination of where they are bound thus employed. Mary Ellen Mark's Indian brothel work is just as honest but somehow considerably more humanist in its illuminations.

The difference may be that she spent a great deal more time with far fewer subjects. If you permit me the arrogance to make a specific recommendation that is what I would suggest as your logical next step. Choose. Go through all these images and pick a half a dozen or so of the individuals who are the most visually arresting AND whose situation in life would make them easily accessible over a period of time and do work of them in depth. At the very least this would humanize them and move you away from the blank stare with which people defend themselves from photographers whom they do not know.

Every picture of a person ever made is a record of the relationship that existed between the photographer and his or her subject. When the relationship is deep, the pictures are complex, rich. When there is little or no relationship, the is no depth, no story beyond the simple and sadly reductive anthropology of surface. Your work as currently conceived is about the fact that there are a lot of sex workers and impoverished people in the third world and their plight is not pretty. I think it fair to say that most thinking people know this already. But work that humanizes its subjects could make the point with an entirely different sort of emphasis. When an individual is drawn in art with sufficient sympathetic detail it become far harder for the viewer not to understand and experience the perfidy of their social predicament.


It is not volume that floats us higher in art. It is quality.

Very Best,

jock

Follow up email from Jock


Happy to have you do anything you like with my notes to you. But please do remember that 
my opinions are limited by my own world view. Your first and most important critic is 
you, yourself. Ideally we make work to please ourselves most of all. True success in the 
business of making art comes when we get to the point where the sheer joy and 
satisfaction of making what we make eclipses and makes irrelevant the opinions of anyone 
else. That's when you have arrived. So many people in art think that what they want is 
fame and recognition. Sadly they have the cart miles before the horse. The point is to 
love what you do so much that the work is its own reward and you finally could care 
less what anyone else thinks. THAT'S when the art world shows up at your door because 
achieving this state means that you have achieved true passion in your work - passion 
not for recognition but for the work and its content. That passion is so rare that 
getting to it is the holy grail. Those lucky enough to do so will be lost in play, 
happy in their work for all their days.



It so matters what a photographer's work is ABOUT. If it is about a hunger for 
affirmation and recognition then its subject is commonplace and venal. But if it is 
about an all-absorbing fascination with the content of the pictures then it becomes 
interesting. Being obsessive about what you shoot means that because of application and 
the investment of time and heart you quickly come to know things about what you are 
photographing that none of the rest of us could. My acid test for work is to consider 
whether the pictures are really only a symptom of a passion larger than the medium 
itself. Salgado's pictures for example are a symptom of a hugely embarked passion for 
the dignity and condition of the people of the third world. He barely cares about art 
at all and that is precisely why he is such an important artist.




I am huffing and puffing like an old fart with all these unsolicited opinions. I will 
leave off. But not before saying that the sheer quantity and persistence of the work you 
sent me is strong evidence of exactly what I have been talking about. I have the sense 
that for whatever reason you can not get enough of what you are shooting -- that you 
are very much a bird transfixed before the cobra. That is the vital and lucky 
circumstance that leads to great places. Let no one dissuade or deflect you.



Best,

jock