2011 Juror Dr. Anthony Bannon

Other years: 2012 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008

For information on Photospiva competitions before 2008, refer to the main spivaarts.org page here

Anthony Bannon (born 1943) is the director of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography & Film, located in Rochester, N.Y. He has held that position since 1996, previously serving as director of the Burchfield-Penney Arts Center and director of Cultural Affairs on the campus of the State University of New York at Buffalo, both located in Buffalo, N.Y..

George Eastman House is the world’s oldest museum of photography and largest museum of photography and film. During Bannon’s tenure the museum launched three internationally renowned graduate and post-graduate schools of film and photograph preservation and conservation.

Bannon has lectured at museums, colleges, and festivals worldwide. He currently serves as chairman of the Lucie Awards/International Photography Awards and was awarded the Golden Career Award in 2007 by the FOTOfusion Festival of Photography & Digital Imaging for his “far-reaching leadership and scholarship in the cultural community.”

More information available on Wikipedia

Juror’s Statement

This was not about landscape. Or glamour. Or still life. Or portrait. Or political action. Not even about fashion. The PhotoSpiva experience was about photography and the medium's unique ability for discovery. My approach to this choosing was similar to an approach to a good education. A good education begins its work when we enter places for learning with an openness for the unique experience. In these circumstances, we hope, in effect, to prove ourselves wrong–to locate propositions unlike any of those we had held before. Art works the same way. A life lived fully in the moment works that way, too. And photography, especially, focuses upon the moment, upon that extraordinary event in the once here and now.

I looked for pictures that played outside of any category. Images which challenged my positions, argued with my assumptions, refused to submit to previous experience. Some images argued boldly, declaratively, and others, by degree, more subtly, softly against expectations. But each selected ground fully its own, making genres less sensible.

Our task with these images is to understand just what they are saying. Surely they hook back to what we have seen before. But they each reach beyond that safety net of previous experience to venture out toward a pictorial experience that is best understood on its own terms–the terms put forth by the extended work of the artist.

And that, ironically, is the failure of this effort: These pictures in the PhotoSpiva grouping are flirtations that call attention to the need for more of their kind, a better articulation from the series in which they spin out their meaning. And that should be our commitment: to find out just whether these works indeed make sense.