Horses for courses,

Last night I spent the evening at Redeye HQ, www.redeye.org.uk I had been asked to be one of the judges for Projection 08 which is an event that is to be held at The Lowry Salford quays on 31st January. There had been a fair amount of submissions and we sat through a fairly long (got a bad dose of image blindness towards the end) evening. The call had gone out for slide show presentations, a set of images, (coherent) along with a soundtrack the idea being that this was a single piece of work. Some of the work, in fact a lot of the work fitted the above brief. There were amongst it photographs that could hold their own with any.
And then next to these wonderful images had been "grafted" some god awful piece of music which at best detracted from the images. Adding music can at the beat of a crotchet send a body of work tumbling into a big smelly bowl of cheesiness, (not in a good way all the people who like cheese). The funny thing is that only once was music mentioned in the original call. soundtrack was referred to, but most people read this as music. The work that shone through was the work that had been made with projection 08 in mind, or at least with this type of presentation in mind. This work is great, sometimes running alongside genius and those who come on the night are in for some great work. Other work was never made to be viewed as digital files with soundtrack, or multimedia, or digital tales or scrapbook TV or what ever this new and for me exciting way of showing images is to be called.
some photographs are always going to be best viewed as fine prints on a gallery wall, and long may that remain. I know as a photographer how desperate we can be to show our work, but in what context should always be an important consideration.................