It's easy to find evidence of certain cynical assertions. For instance, that the Internet is unreliable. I ran across a supposedly independent, allegedly expert article yesterday (on an unrelated topic) that was just so irresponsibly bad it almost defied belief. Yet it seemed earnest. That "the Internet is often wrong" doesn't mean "the Internet is always wrong," however—that would require a different sort of comforting certainty.
Similarly, ammunition is easy to find for people who are critical of critical verbiage. I was struck by that looking at Johnny Savage's pictures taken from inside abandoned and unfinished office buildings in Ireland, at LensCulture. The whole apparatus of meaning of these pictures seems detached from the pictures themselves. When Alexander Strecker writes, "In these twilit, reflected spaces, we come to understand the ambiguities of Ireland's boom, the shifting substance of anything that's too good to be true," that conclusion seems to me specifically and pointedly not true—there is no such understanding in these pictures; the pictures themselves mostly do not even hint that they are taken in Ireland, and they in fact say nothing at all about specific economic calamities nor any platitudes that might be derived therefrom. That's the job of the accompanying words.
But I like the pictures anyway. They do indicate ambiguity, and the delicate light of northerly summer evenings. The platitude I derive: this indicates one of the failures of the critical (and by extension, art-institutional) approach grafted on to photography to make it seem sufficiently elite and intellectual: because sometimes pictures can be better than the ideas behind them.
Mike
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