| This book originated in workshops taught initially at the University of Westminster and subsequently at Photofusion and the City Lit. The aim of the workshops was to empower students by opening up the processes and practices of exhibiting. What the workshops taught me was that, although students are increasingly working towards a career aim of exhibiting their work, they too frequently leave college with inadequate exhibition experience or the knowledge to be ready to start showing their work professionally.
My aim, then, has been to write a book that can be used as a guide to exhibiting so that any potential exhibitor can take some control of the process. Providing an overview of this kind inevitably means that the process can be oversimplifi ed; it suggests there is a right and wrong way to approach exhibiting, that all exhibiting photographers will follow the same route and that all photographs are part of a single discipline with standard methods of presentation. Of course none of this is true and I have attempted to include enough dispute and contradiction to make it clear that the photographers or artists have to make the choices that suit them, their work, and their showing circumstances.
I have used the terms photographer and artist fairly interchangeably here and I make no apology for it. Debate about the terms rumbles on and the use of one or other usually owes as much to educational background, personal preference, and the gallery context as to ideological
concerns. |
