Photocriticus Interruptus

Full Description:

Photocriticus Interruptus is a set of dialogues between photography critic A. D. Coleman and photographer and educator Alex Harsley, addressing Coleman's unexpected departure from the pages of the Village Voice and New York Times, for which he wrote widely read and influential columns on a weekly/biweekly basis between spring 1968 and fall 1974.

These losses of two major platforms for his work constituted a major rupture in Coleman's project as a critic, while also depriving professionals in the field and photography's growing audience of Coleman's voice and ideas at a key moment in the medium's evolution. It drastically truncated critical coverage of the photography scene in the mainstream New York-based press, since neither periodical replaced Coleman, effectively closing down the spaces he had opened for that discourse.

Harsley initiated these conversations at the time, publishing them in installments in the Minority Photographers Newsletter, the small-circulation house organ of Minority Photographers, Inc. MPI was a non-profit organization founded by Harsley to support the work of underrepresented workers in this medium, which had not yet achieved critical recognition as a major art form. As a component of that project Harsley also established the 4th Street Photo Gallery in the East Village, which served as both a showcase for members' work and a meeting place for them and others in what many then referred to as the "photo community."

This book brings together for the first time the complete original 1973 dialogues, adding to them reflective commentaries by Coleman and Harsley and other contextualizing material. In aggregate, these form a time capsule, describing the New York photography world on the cusp of the "photo boom" of the mid-1970s, which would shortly bring a new level of critical attention, gallery and museum support, collector interest, and public awareness to the medium.