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 p.2 #1 · Which photo do you think jurors chose for this Sierra-themed exhibit? | |
Dan- thanks for taking the time to put together such a detailed response! I'm a OK photographer and would be unlikely to be considered for a juried selection. But I do find these types of processes incredibly interesting!
Thanks and congratulations again.
Bob.
gdanmitchell wrote:
Thanks! I like #1, too, but I have been a little surprised by how much others like it. I think that’s a good thing!
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This is going to be a bit long, so anyone uninterested in how selection may work can stop here. :-)
The main reason I shared this set of images in this context was because I thought that there might be an interest in exploring some of the mystery surrounding submission to and judging for exhibits like this. The first time I caught on to how much of this is a mystery was years ago on a backcountry trip with a group of photographers where the midday discussion turned to how a particular entity selected work for inclusion. The participants in the discussion included some fairly successful photographers, and even they were not sure about how it worked! So I’m glad to have a chance to reply to your questions!
I’ve had work in a number of exhibits — mostly landscape photography but also other genres including night and street photography. I’ve also been part of teams assessing submissions and selecting work for various exhibits — some were purely for photography and some included other media: painting, sculpture, ceramics, and more.
To answer the first part of your question, they typically start with some sort of general idea of how many pieces they might select, though this can change based on the size of the selected work and the size of the display space.
Often the jury selects work in phases, and refines the selection as they go along. A first pass might typically serve to exclude images that they know will not get into the show for various reasons including the quality of the work and whether it even fits the shows focus. A small group of jurors will review ALL of the submissions — these days typically working with online versions of them and with each juror working separately. They might us a number system or similar, where they rate each work on, for example, a 1-10 scale.
Then they usually compare their assessments. Some work will often appear high on the lists of all of the jurors. Those are usually the easy decisions, and that work will move forward. Likewise, some work will get low ratings by all the jurors and usually will not move forward.
The trickiest stuff involves work that might get a very high ranking from one or more jurors and an indifferent or even low rating from others. Often at this point some discussion takes place, with those who gave these pieces the higher ratings get a chance to speak for them. In some cases we might simply decide that the other jurors are right and the work may not move forward. In others the juror(s) who gave the work the higher ratings might feel strongly that it should be included and may persuade the other jurors. The opposite happens, too. Especially in mixed media shows, where judges come from very different backgrounds, a specialist in one area might have to explain to the others why a particular work is or is not excellent from that media’s perspective. I’ve had to do that in such cases — other jurors might have given really high ratings to a photograph that had obvious (and even gross) technical flaws, or they might have given very low ratings to something that should be ranked much higher from the perspective of photographers.
At this point, we end up with a smaller set of pieces, but still likely more than the show can accommodate. So the filtering process continues and may become, from some perspectives, more subjective. To make up an example, let’s say that we were judging a photography exhibit focused on landscape photography. There might be 20 lovely color photographs of autumn aspen trees, all of very high quality and 30 of other subjects and perhaps in monochrome. At this point the jurors are not just trying to select the “15 best photographs” but to create a beautiful, balanced exhibit of perhaps 15 photographs from among those selected. It can’t be all about autumn aspen trees! So they might decide that they have to pick only the two best aspen photos find some variety among the other submitted work — different subjects, large and small scale work, monochrome and color, alternative processes, “realistic” versus more abstract, etc. It is also typical to limit the number of works from each artist. Imagine that some really outstanding photographer submits 10 really wonderful prints. As good as they are, few shows would devote half of their display to the work of one photographer – so there is the hard task of picking the best one or two. (Sadly, this can sometimes lead to some less distinguished work being accepted as a result if the pool of submitted work is not large.)
So, I think you can see that this starts to get at your second question — yes, indeed, selection does often end up workign to create a balanced show as described above.
So how does a photographer react to all of this when considering what to submit? The rules are pretty loose and there are plenty of of exceptions. And individual exhibits will have their own “personalities” that shift things around. But to generalize:
- I think that it is better to limit submissions rather than submitting far too much work. Be a bit brutal about selecting your very best work.
- Ask trusted friends and associates for their feedback on the work you are considering. It is often hard for photoraphers (and I include myself here) to see their work as others do. You don’t have to choose what they choose, but you need to consider what they are telling you.
- While maintaining some stylistic continuity, it may be good to submit work with some variety. (In the case in this thread, I included water, trees, intimate landscape, monochrome and color, etc. )
- Be cautious about submitting work that features extremely common visual themes. Such work may get into a show, but in many cases the bar will be higher, both because jurors may not see it as very innovative or original and because many others may submit similar work.
- Accept that some work that you think is great will not get in… and that the jurors will make some selections that you think are not worthy.
- In the end, don’t take it too hard if your work doesn’t get accepted. A lot of work does not get in, but that often reflects some of he realities of putting together a balanced show and not the quality of your work.
On that last note a little story. I’ll try to anonymize it. (It isn’t about me.) There’s a highly-regarded gallery in a well-traveled location in the United States that has a stellar reputation and which has long represented some of the very best, most highly regarded photographers in a particular genre and often featuring work from and about a specific geographic area. One photographer represented by that gallery for a few decades and almost universally regarded as one of the best regularly submitted work to an annual exhibit whose focus intersected with the focus of that gallery… and none of his work was ever selected!
Over the years, as various folks submitted work to this show sometimes they did not get accepted either. (It has happened to me, though I’ve been in that show a number of times, too.) In consolation, they/we would jokingly say, “Well, if [anonymous outstanding photographer’s] work did’t get in…” :-)
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