The devil may care

22 juli 2015

Dear photography, Why have you grown so painfully serious and formal in these times?

Where is your playfulness, the skips and jumps, the mucking about, your devil may care attitude that laughs about rules and conventions? Show me the ones who dare have genuine, generous fun with the camera, in front of the camera, behind the computer screen or with the images they end up making, finding, destroying and reconfiguring.
Sincerely, a curator

After writing this letter to photography, the curator travelled far and wide to seek out work that spoke to her of laughter, candour and a generosity of spirit, and whose playfulness makes light of the unwritten rules in photography.

The curator’s heart rejoiced, and she gathered her findings in an exhibition for which she stole a title from a book that borrowed it from a song that used an expression which reportedly goes back to pirates in the 18th century, and which suits perfectly: The Devil May Care.

Here the curator’s story ends, and another one begins for five ‘enfants terribles’ parented by contemporary photography: Aso Mohammadi (CH), Augustin Rebetez (CH), Kenta Cobayashi (JP), Eman Ali (OM) and Vendula Knopová (CZ).

Each in their own way they defy both in their work and in their personal lives expectations about how photography should look for it to be called ‘good’, or how photographers should relate to the tradition, their public or to their professional field with its self-appointed authorities.
Because, as the poet Howard Jacobson tells it: “Only to the degree that men and women create something surprising to themselves are they surprising to us. The rest is imposture. Convictions, nostrums, the censorious baggage of the doctrinaire – it is from such profanities against art that we need to be diverted.”