Controversial Mississippi Photographer Slated to Appear at the 47th Chautauqua Exhibition of American Art

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
James W. Bailey
2142 Glencourse Lane
Reston, VA 20191
Phone: 703-476-1474
Cell: 504-669-8650
Email: [email protected]
Web site: http://jameswbailey.artroof.com

CONTROVERSIAL SOUTHERN FILM PHOTOGRAPHER SLATED TO APPEAR IN THE 47th CHAUTAUQUA EXHIBITION OF AMERICAN ART IN CHAUTAUQUA NEW YORK

DOES DIGITAL MEDIA SPELL THE DEATH OF 35mm FILM AND ITS AFFORDABLE ACCESSIBILITY TO POOR AND MARGINAL ARTISTS AROUND THE WORLD? AN EXPERIMENTAL ARTIST FROM MISSISSIPPI OFFERS HARSH WORDS OF CRITICISM FOR DIGITAL ARTISTS, THE GLOBAL MANUFACTURERS OF DIGITAL MEDIA AND THE CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUMS, CURATORS AND ART CRITICS THAT CHAMPION THE INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL ART DIVIDE

(Reston, Va.) Last year in the United States, for the first time in the history of photography, camera retailers sold more digital cameras than traditional 35mm film-based cameras. Within a few short years many film photographers think it is very likely that film will vanish from your local camera supply store. The current sweeping revolution of DVD replacing VHS as the preferred consumer standard has clearly established the supremacy of digital media in the market place. As digital technology rapidly replaces conventional film techniques and equipment, an experimental artist from Mississippi, doggedly resists the temptation to “go digital,” and in a style worthy of a New Orleans jazz funeral actually celebrates the death of 35mm film.

Artist James W. Bailey calls his violent style of photographic art “Rough Edge Photography.” He buys damaged cameras in thrift stores and mutilates his film and prints. Lenses are scratched, holes may be punched in the film canisters with a needle, and prints may be burned and torn, along with the original negatives. “I push found and discarded equipment to the extreme. I like the radical imperfections, the accidental quality that can be found in mistreating the equipment, negatives and prints,” Bailey says. “For me, classic photography had become too weighted down by its own rules, conventions and practices. This, combined with the impulse among so many photographers to abandon film and rush toward digital, made me want to explore 35mm film in a radically brutal fashion. ‘Rough Edge Photography’ is the result of my wanting to hang on to film until the bitter end.”

An emerging artist from Mississippi, who has created an underground firestorm of controversy among many fine arts photographers with his outspoken criticisms of digital photography, Bailey has been juried into the 47th Chautauqua Exhibition of American Art. Organized by the Chautauqua Center for the Visual Arts, the 47th Chautauqua Exhibition of American Art will take June 20 - July 11, 2004, and will feature 75 contemporary American artists, including Bailey.

Bailey’s star in the world of fine art photography began to rise earlier this year when he was awarded an honorable mention prize for his “Rough Edge Photography” piece, “Circle Theatre - New Orleans,” at the Bethesda International Photography Competition, by William F. Stapp, the National Portrait Gallery’s first Curator of Photography. Organized by the Fraser Gallery of Bethesda, Maryland, located just outside of Washington, D.C., the Bethesda International Photography Competition has quickly become recognized as one of the most prestigious photography competitions in the United States. In May, Bailey’s piece, “Woman at the Tomb,” was selected for inclusion in the 47th Chautauqua Exhibition of American Art, considered to be one of the major surveys of contemporary American art in the United States. The juror for this exhibition was Dr. Donald Kuspit, recognized as one of the leading American art historians and art critics. Kuspit reviewed more than 1,600 entries and selected 75 artists for this year’s exhibition.

Bailey explains that his “Rough Edge Photography” method results in the creation of one-of-a-kind images that cannot be duplicated or reprinted like a standard photograph from a negative. “In the case of ‘Circle Theatre - New Orleans’ and ‘Woman at the Tomb’, for example, I actually melted my original negatives and let the residue drip onto the burned prints. The result is that these particular photographic images that I shot of an old neighborhood theatre sign and a cemetery tomb in New Orleans will be the only ones that will ever exist.”

Although his photographic images frequently center on the impoverished underbelly of New Orleans, Bailey hopes his art work can help dramatize his global concerns with the digital direction of fine art photography and its relationship to poor artists around the world: “The state of modern fine art photography is of grave concern to me. I’m angry about the worldwide corporate drive among key photographic equipment manufacturers to replace film with digital. I’m also angry that many of the most respected contemporary art museums and galleries in the United States have been hood-winked into supporting the trendy nature of digital art and digital artists at the expense of discovering and supporting more marginal and far more talented photographers who work with materials and processes that are not in their eyes as sexy. ‘Rough Edge Photography’ is my attempt to reinvent and reinterpret film at a time when this vapid digital technology and its ruthless practitioners are aggressively advancing their own dumbed-down artistic agendas. I wanted to find an artistic way of creatively experimenting with the end of film. Destroying my negatives and incorporating the burned residue into the actual work of art seemed to me like the next logical step in the death of film.”

A contrarian by nature, Bailey explains that part of the objective of his work is to dramatize the banal trends in modern fine art photography by juxtaposing his small scale images against the larger digital images of his counterparts: “I want to go against this trend in modern fine art photography to see who can produce the world’s largest image. For example, all of my images are printed on standard 4˝ x 6˝ paper. This is intentional. I like small-scale photography. It forces a viewer to come up close and really examine the work. The trend in modern photography, especially digital photography, is big, bigger and biggest images. Go to any photography show and you’ll see this gaudy display of narcissism among photographers who compete to outdo each other with the size of their manufactured images. I think you lose intimacy with that.”

Although Bailey’s radical experiments with conventional film photography would be considered cutting-edge, he actually reached back to his Southern roots and a childhood experience in Mississippi, as well as an unfolding national tragedy, the events of 9-11, for his inspiration: “During the year leading up to 9-11, I found myself spending a lot of time revisiting childhood conversations I had in Mississippi with my father, a fireman. He used to reluctantly talk about his experiences of walking through burned homes and seeing the tragedy of family heirlooms that had been destroyed by a fire and dealing with the raw emotions of the victims of fires. When I was 11 years old, I experienced this myself when I participated in rescuing household effects from a burning house near my grandfather’s farm in Mississippi. A box that I pulled from the fire contained a collection of smoldering family photographs. The blistered and burned effects on these photographs left a remarkable and indelible impression on me,” says Bailey.

“For several years prior to 9-11, I had been shooting street life scenes in New Orleans in black and white. During that time, I played by all the rules that most serious photographers are taught or learn. I played by the rules until I became bored with them. I felt that the ‘rules’ were constricting my vision. I was also feeling, at the time, the intense heat of the advancements in digital photography and sensed something dreaded in the air: the potential death of 35mm film. The horrific events of 9-11 brought a lot of scattered artistic ideas into absolute focus for me. After that terrible day, I knew that my photographic style would never be the same. ‘Rough Edge Photography’ is my attempt to discover beauty in the death of film. Whether we realize it nor not, we are all witnesses to the final days of the most intense and, in my opinion, the most mystical art form ever created by man: film photography.”

Although he can speak with eloquent Southern charm about the inspirations for his art, Bailey quickly becomes agitated when the subject of digital photography is discussed: “The cat’s out of the bag on the fraudulent nature of digital photography and digital media in general. Look, I’m from the South, and where I come from you learn to talk straight early in life. I’ve become controversial for simply stating what’s on the minds of a lot of artists, particularly photographers. Once you get past all the infantile digital tricks that untalented computer geeks can perform using sophisticated software and hardware that is unaffordable to 99\% of the world’s population, what are you really left with? In my opinion, a plethora of images completely devoid of soul, spirit, life and humanity. The digital divide is widening on a daily basis in the world of art, commerce and life. Those who play in the digital game are able to do so because they have the resources to buy all the crap you need in order to play. The idea that an average artist from Brasil, or Nigeria or India or any other developing country can compete with this technology is so sad and tragic that if it weren’t true, it would almost be surrealistically funny. Most of the artists in this world are working with the artistic materials equivalent of a beat-up soccer ball, while comfortable upper middle class white American digital artists are ‘creating’ their art using wireless connections to offsite computers while skiing down the slopes of the Rockies in Aspen, Colorado. We have reached the worst point in the history of art between the resources needed to produce art that is exhibited through the museum and gallery systems and the availability of those resources to the average artist in every country. How in the world can a poor artist in a country that is barely wired for electricity ever hope to compete for international recognition against a million dollar multi-media mega-digital theme park style installation piece that is funded b!
y a pano
ply of corporations whose very products are part of the exhibition?”

Bailey believes there is a sinister corporate conspiracy at work in the drive to digitize art and that many museums that survey contemporary art have been cooperative agents in the displacement of marginal and poor artists in preference to so-called cutting-edge digital artists: “As far as I’m concerned, there is an evil impetus that drives the move toward digital art. Part of the plan is to force the globalization of this vicious technology down the throats of the rest of the art world that can afford to buy it. If you’re a poor artist in the third world and you don’t have the money to buy the technology, then screw you, you’ll just have to make do with whatever reject art materials you can beg, borrow or steal. Look, there are some real conspiratorial factors taking place in the world of fine art photography and nobody wants to talk about this subject. For example, it is a known fact that previously affordable quality products such as certain highly respected and appreciated printing papers are being taken off the market by key photographic manufacturers. These manufacturers are cutting deals with certain elements in the world of fine art photography to sell these products to these entities so they can corner the market on these products for their personal use, or worse, so they can resell them at a future date for astronomical prices to those wealthy film photographers who can afford to pay the ransom. Digital art is the end result of capitalism run amuck. The whole purpose of this scheme is this: at the end of the day affordable film photography will no longer exist and digital technology will mostly be in the hands of wealthy white people from a handful of so-called developed countries, primarily the United States and its European allies. When the last 35mm film camera is sold and the last 35mm film canister is dispensed, then mark my word, the Disneyfication of the art world will at last be complete and Michael Eisner will be empowered to rename the Whitney Museum after Mickey Mouse.”

Raised in the Southern Baptist Church of his native Mississippi, Bailey, although professing no overt religious beliefs, clearly expresses a conservative fire and brimstone religious sensibility with his appreciation of film and his concerns about the “evilness” of digital media: “I honestly believe that there is something wonderfully mystical, magical and richly spiritual about film. How else can you explain the fact that 500 people can sit in a darkened theatre and contemplatively enjoy a movie about any subject without it erupting into a violent melee? I am convinced that there is something inherent in film that fosters such a contemplative state of mind. With digital media, forget it. What you get is an agitated, angry and aggressive state of mind. How else to explain the extraordinary financial success of multi-national corporations that purvey violent themed digital games and the documented correlation of these games to measured aggressive behavior in youth who spend hours per day playing these games? If you digitized any filmed movie and projected it on a screen for an audience in a darkened theatre, I am convinced that the reaction would be far more collectively hostile than you would experience among the same audience watching the original film version, no matter how violently themed that original filmed version might be. I think this is something that ought to be studied. Digital images are cleverly designed and engineered to interact with the brain at a level that induces violence.”

More alarmingly, Bailey also finds remarkable parallels between digital media manufacturers, the contemporary art museum structure, digital artists and the illegal drug trade: “Remember this: digital media and digital technology was not developed by passive non-aggressive peace and love artists and who wanted to share it with the world in a collective effort to make our planet a better place. All things digital were developed by multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations and spread like a virus through the machinations of their aggressive marketing and advertising departments. Digital artists are now addicted to this technology like a crack addict is to crack. If you don’t believe it, ask one to go cold turkey and give up his computers, software, hardware, scanners, and digital cameras and see how he reacts. These addicts can’t live without their drug. The cartels in the art drug trade are the Sonys, Microsofts, Apples and other digital media manufacturers. The street dealers are the contemporary art museums and galleries that have bought into the digital fraud. The addicts in denial are the digital artists. The trendy drug of choice is digital technology. It’s the Extasy of modern art. And what’s really amazing to me is that people in the art world, museum directors, art critics, artists and other ‘cultural’ leaders wonder why so few people today really passionately interact with the visual arts. They refuse to admit the obvious: why should the average person waste his time and money going to a museum and to see an over-promoted underwhelming boring digital art show when he can stay at home, kick his feet up on his coffee table, open a can of beer and play Final Fantasy XXIII for the 5000th time on his 250 inch flat screen high definition home theatre system. Never in the history of art have so many artists been beholden to so few corporations. And worse than that, far too many contemporary visual art museums and galleries around the planet simply bow down and worship at the altar of!
digital
art with barely a breath of questioning or insight into how this situation has come into being. Where are the outsiders in the world of art? Can you imagine Jackson Pollock being a spokesperson for the Sherman Williams paint company fifty years ago? Digital artists and the museums and galleries that support them have sold their artistic souls to AOL Time Warner, Disney, Sony and others for 15 minutes of fame and 30 pieces of silver.”

Although he quickly denies any political affiliations, Bailey clearly espouses a populist rhetoric with his art theory: “I want to show with my art that it’s still possible for an average artist/photographer with few resources to create unique photographic images without having to be plugged into the electric grid. The cameras I use are found in discard bins at the Salvation Army. My photographic processing involves the use of surreptitious assistants who work for drugstore photo processors. I meet them in the middle of the night after they’ve closed their stores and we experiment with different mixtures of chemicals during film processing to achieve various burn effects on the photographs. The burn effects themselves are the result of using a simple box of matches. It’s an anarchistic approach that I hope illustrates that you don’t have to buy a $15,000 Nikon 10.5 mega pixel digital camera, own a Bill Gates certified XP operating system computer and subscribe to the latest version of Adobe Photoshop ™ to create profoundly engaging photographic works of art. I believe the philosophy behind my process of ‘Rough Edge Photography’ has the potential to place the power of photographic art making back into the hands of artists with few means, but expansive imaginations. After all, poor artists constitute the majority of artists from every country in the world, including the United States. I guess being from Mississippi, the poorest state per capita in the United States, I’m sensitive to this issue, especially having witnessed so many African-American outsider/folk artists being ripped off by ruthless collectors and galleries. I want to rescue art from corporations, corporate museums, corporate galleries and corporate collectors and put it back into the hands of artists. If that’s a political position, if that’s a radical position, if that’s a controversial position, then I say bring on the revolution! Being from Mississippi and having five direct ancestors who fought for the Confederate!
States
Army during the Civil War, I guess there’s something in my DNA that makes me and all other Mississippians something of a rebel. An important part of the rebel mentality is to always be for the underdog. There’s very little doubt in my mind who the underdogs are today in the world of modern art.”

“Rough Edge Photography” is not Bailey’s only form of Southern Culture inspired art. He has also developed a style of painting he calls “Wind Painting” that is inspired by the vanishing Southern African-American rural tradition of the Bottle Tree. Bailey keeps an eye on the weather forecasts, and when a storm is approaching, he puts a canvass on a Lazy Susan and suspends paintbrushes above the canvas, releases the paintbrushes and lets the winds freely blow the brushes that are dipped in paint and suspended from tree limbs across the canvass.

Bailey’s “Rough Edge Photography” work of art, “Woman at the Tomb” will be on exhibit at the 47th Chautauqua Exhibition of American Art. The exhibition is being held at the Chautauqua Center for the Visual Arts on the campus of the Chautauqua Institution. For directions, see the Chautauqua Institution’s web site at http://ciweb.org.

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