When you are in it and someone says something great, you think to yourself, yes, remember that advice, then when you get home and try to remember all that sage wisdom, somehow it has faded…

The experience itself has not faded- Look3 is a tremendous festival, very well organized, just to mention a few things:

The location could not be better on a pedestrian boulevard with great food all around, tables in the center to meet and eat, even AC outlets on the lampposts! There were signs and banners everywhere, you could find your way around, and all the volunteers and staff were super motivated and excited.

Charlottesville is well integrated in the festival, all the merchants love the business, even cab drivers have opinions on film vs. digital. They must be reading photoblogs…

The curation and direction of the festival is firm: they are not about workshops altho they have them- what they are about is education, and the “image”. It is the festival of “the photograph”, and they are dedicated to enriching the experience of making and sharing work. They want to get young photographers next to the experienced veterans, and they want to put experienced artists next to each other on stage to see what happens- the pairing of Sally Mann to interview Nan Goldin was a masterstroke- it completely changed my idea of Nan’s work. As she says, she has no relation to “NanGoldin”, whoever she was.  That person is gone. And Nan even turned the tables on Mann, interviewing the interviewer, in a conversation on a couch on stage where it felt like we were listening in on a private conversation, you wanted it to continue to see just where it was going to end up.

The pairing of Massimo Vitali with NPR’s Alex Chadwick was another great idea- a professional interviewer who does his homework, and that voice- if you closed your eyes you could imagine it was Sunday afternoon and you were listening to a great radio interview, and Massimo spoke very intelligently about his work and the realities of the contemporary art world- about how Marianne Boesky challenged him early on in his development to consider presentation as central to what it was he was doing- he realized he was making objects- large scale plexi mounted images, not images- and to concentrate on showing a small body of work over an extended period of time to cement in the viewer or buyers mind who he was and exactly what he did. And it ran counter to the advice he was getting and his own ideas that he had formed over a 30 year commercial career, he was told the beach was not interesting, the pictures were not interesting, and he should drop it and move on. That has since been proven wrong, altho Massimo himself acknowledges he does not exactly understand the contemporary art world and its values, but at last he is getting to make the work he wants to make. A very illuminating interview.

Scott Thode curated what seemed like two-thirds of the work in the evening slideshows- and did a superb job. He must be nearly blind by now. There were several standouts for me- Gillian Laub’s Four Generations, Tim Davis’s Dollar General Drive By, Jeff Jacobsens completely amazing From the Catskills,  on night two, and on the final night, Donald Weber’s Interrogations, Erin Trieb’s The Homecoming, and Robert van deer Hilst’s Chinese Interiors stood out for me. Crowd favorites were Yuri Kozyrev’s The Arab Spring got a huge applause, and the festival ending video from Jacob Krupnick- Girl Walk//All Day Shot which you can see heregot everyone to their feet when the featured improv dancers from the video magically turned up live and performed. A great way to end the evening.

I could probably write more, all the interactions and conversations, how everyone is faced with similar challenges and as David Alan Harvey says, we are one big tribe and this is a gathering of the tribe. The festival is also about community, and is one of the few places I know where photographers and editors feel like they are standing on the same side of the line, all trying daily to get to the image.

If you can go next year, go. I’ll be there.