Fred Ritchin Essay

Judging Fifty Crows

There is a beauty in the room. The light liquid. The coffee has that dark roasted smell. Fresh fruit. Muffins. Green plants. People smile, joke. Introductions.

Before it begins: Apprehension. Selection. Rejection. Rejoicing. And the sadness in what might have been.

What might have been? Sometimes better photographs, more acutely drawn, more complex, more nuanced, more inclusive, more compelling, more interrogatory, more intense. Sometimes it is a more pointed concept.

Or sometimes it is the world that could be better. In fact it is most of the time that the worlds, represented in these photographs, could be better.

Suffering is reinvented. In the room tables are filled, piled high with little rectangles of suffering. Or the same ghastly suffering that has always consumed us. But there are pictures that cause even an experienced viewer of pictures to re-think the universe of horror. About going to the witch doctor to lose one’s soul before prostituting one’s body to pay for one’s family. About permanent grief extinguishing the eyes of a whole galaxy of mothers; emaciating illness eviscerating the palpable flesh of daughters. More horror. An actual museum of death.

Yet occasionally the sweet drops of redemption. The covered women who keep one foot in orthodoxy, the other in a precipitously evolving modern world. The poorest who make their homes out of the most vibrant discarded colors. The struggling farmers, reluctant to leave the fields. And the photographers – did I forget the photographers? – who somehow, for some reason, gaze at it all so that we too shall share in the seeing.

And then there is us, the three judges, ably assisted by three students, reading long proposals, measuring need, possibility. We try to act like Solomon: Which baby can be cut in half? Knowing that finally we will be inadequate, exhausted, with a new assortment of nightmares from this inquiry. And knowing that the piercing bottomlesss scream of why? depicted in so many of the pictures – all the more acute for being rendered soundlessly – will reverberate forever.

But we also know (or else why would we do this?) that the moneys and good intentions of Fifty Crows and the staff – Andy, Lil, Warren, Erin - will help at least some of the photographers to give sound to the silence. Certain injustices will be made visible. Perhaps (we fervently hope) a few will be rectified. Which is what may help us, judges with glazed eyes, to sleep through the passing of the following, troubled night.

- Fred Ritchin
July 2003

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