Grad School Part 1
So this is what’s been keeping me so busy. After finals, which were horrible, I flew out to California to visit my uncle and aunt who are both painters to get advice about graduate school. Also, just hang around and take pictures (my film back has a light leak — lame). I think they gave me terrific advice and I got the list solidified. In order of preference: Yale, RISD, Columbia, Parsons, International Center of Photography — Bard. Yale was due on the 9th, and I got it in just in time (postmarked 11:50pm). RISD, Columbia and ICP are all due on Tuesday, so it’s going to be a busy weekend, and then I have all the time in the world for Parsons, which is due on February 1.
This grad school thing has been a pretty interesting experience, and my thoughts on the issue have evolved a lot since I started thinking about it over the summer. I figured it didn’t much matter where I went, so long as it was in New York and I had the two years to really focus on developing my skills. Christian Patterson and my aunt, Deborah Kirkland, both told me that I should try and get into the best programs possible, though they both meant different things. Christian reminded me that he never went to school for photography and basically thought it to be superfluous. He said that if I wanted to go to school, I should go to the place where I would make the best connections. Deborah, having gotten and MFA and who teaches painting at Sonoma Junior College was speaking of the actual academic strength of the programs.
That was all in the fall. I don’t really know when my mind changed, but by the time I actually got around to starting my applications this week, I basically had come to agree with both of them, and so I’m dying to go to Yale, even though it’s not actually in the place I’m dying to live. Their program is incredible. Tod Papageorge, the department’s chair, is this luminary thinker about photography (Read Alec Soth’s post about him from a few months ago), and their senior critic is none other than Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. Also among the faculty is John Lehr, whose work is basically the model for the kind of thing I want to be doing.
So, I don’t think I’m actually going to get into Yale this year. Until this week, I thought I would be perfectly content to go where ever I got in; it seemed more important just to be in grad school than being in any specific program. But now I think I pretty much need to do whatever it takes to get into Yale. If I get in there this year, that will be a miracle. If not, I’m starting to think I should take a couple of years to develop myself and maybe some impressive recommendations.
Looks like I’d better get my job at American Apparel back.
January 15th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
“Now you go to schools like Yale and — [the students] would deny it, but they’re lying — their real ambition is to be stars in the gallery system. And I wouldn’t want those young people to know this, but there is actually a substantial market for new people doing something that might look flashy for a moment, because of the fact that there are, you know, a million new billionaires in this country, and they or their wives want to be on the boards of museums. And you can’t collect Jasper Johns anymore. I mean, forget collecting Matisse or Picasso. You can’t collect Rauschenberg or those people — all the good stuff is already in captivity! So you’ve got to find a new guy.” — LA Weekly — TALKING PICTURES John Szarkowski on the good, the bad and the flat in American photography, BY HOLLY MYERS AND TOM CHRISTIE, Wednesday, December 6, 2006
January 15th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
A warning from a man who certainly knows photography by way of a woman who certainly knows danger. Thank you for sharing this article, and thanks for reading the blog.