A Photographic Life - 79: Plus A.D. Coleman

In episode 79 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering the audience for photo books, paying for work to appear in a magazine and the teaching of digital visual literacy. Plus this week photographic critic, historian, educator, curator and writer A.D.Coleman takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ You can also access and subscribe to these podcasts at SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/unofphoto on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-photographic-life/id1380344701 on Player FM https://player.fm/series/a-photographic-life and Podbean www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/i6uqx-6d9ad/A-Photographic-Life-Podcast A. D. Coleman (Allan Douglass) was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943. During the McCarthy era (1951-3) his family moved to France, and then briefly to England, before returning to the U.S. Aside from that interruption he was raised in Manhattan, where he went to school in Greenwich Village, and Hunter College. He received a B.A. in English Literature from Hunter in 1964 and started writing in 1967 taking up the position as the first photo critic for The New York Times, authoring 120 articles during his tenure. He has contributed to the Village Voice, New York Observer and numerous magazines, artist monographs and other publications worldwide, published eight books and more than 2000 essays on photography and related subjects. Coleman has lectured and taught internationally and his work has been translated into 21 languages and published in 31 countries. He received the first fellowship awarded to a photography critic by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976, was a Guest Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 1993. Coleman has served as Publisher and Executive Director of The Nearby Café, a multi-subject electronic magazine where his blog on photography, Photocritic International, appears. He also founded and directs Photography Criticism CyberArchive (photocriticism.com), the most extensive online database ever created of writing about photography by authors past and present, and he co-directs The New Eyes Project (www.k12photoed.org), an online resource for everyone teaching photography to young people. In 2010 he received the J Dudley Johnston Award for “lifetime achievement in writing about photography,” from the Royal Photographic Society, UK. In 2014 he received the Insight Award from the Society for Photographic Education and in 2015 he received the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi (SDX) Award for Research About Journalism, as well as The Photo Review Award for Outstanding Contributions to Photography. Coleman’s first major curatorial effort, Saga: the Journey of Arno Rafael Minkkinen, made its debut in both book and exhibition form in September 2005 and now tours internationally. A second museum-scale curatorial project, China: Insights, premiered in 2008 and continues to tour the U.S. Since 2005, exhibitions that Coleman has curated have opened at museums and galleries in Canada, China, Finland, Italy, Rumania, Slovakia, and the U.S. His book Critical Focus received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Writing on Photography in 1995. He still writes and talks on photography internationally and lives in New York. www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic Image of A.D.Coleman by Bill Jay Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. © Grant Scott 2019