I ran into a discussion of Natacha
Merritt’s photographs on Salon recently, and I felt like I was
listening to the dead speak. I’d missed this particular tempest-in-a-teapot
when it was fresh grist for the newsmill, but learned that Merritt
is a young woman whose art sometimes involves taking strictly-digital-camera
sexually explicit photographs of herself with various partners; that
her website and, later, her book caused quite a stir insofar as her
pictures are clearly meant to be taken as art but are also quite obviously
pornography; that her own position is that the distinctions between
art and other-than-art, documentation and exploitation, erotica and
pornography, authentic and inauthentic are all bourgeois constructions
and very last-epoch; and that she views herself as an artist, and
that as such she must always be encouraged and supported in any enterprise
she takes up, lest the unending cosmic dance of Art be somehow stifled.
In an interview I read with her, she went out of her way to let the
interviewer know that she was entirely ignorant of the most basic
aspects of the actual craft of photography, pointedly asserting at
one point: “I don’t know what Kodachrome is,” and taking
every available opportunity to assert that her art reflected only
the workings of her own mind and eye. She does not believe that it
is necessary to know anything about photography to be a great artist
whose work consists mainly of taking photographs.
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