What would you hang on your wall?

Electrified Cloudscape. Boulder County, Colorado, 2015

Photographic art comes in many different forms. You have beautiful landscapes, street and documentary, abstract, project-based, architecture, commercial, portrait, wildlife…it goes on and on.

But, what would you choose to put on your wall?

Just a wild-hash guess, but I am thinking you probably would NOT hang a Sally Mann photograph from her project, Body Farm. Who wants strange, large, wet plate collodion photographs of pieces of human bodies hanging in their living room? No one, unless you be Hannibal Lector or of his ilk.

Yet, her work is extremely valuable, highly collectable, and coveted for major exhibitions by museums and galleries around the world. It is certainly one kind of art, and a necessary kind at that in that it pushes the frontiers of what photography is and what it can say about our ephemeral, physical existence on this Spaceship Earth.

Another example might be the work of Joel Peter-Witkin. I doubt anyone has a copy of his 1998 work, A Day in the Country, on their wall, an image which insinuates a sexual act between a horse and a woman. He often uses not-so-lovely nudes and mortuary body parts in a number of his works. But again, like Mann, his work is coveted and collected by many. In fact, you would most likely have a hard time affording the price of one of his prints.

In Peter-Witkin’s case, he speaks powerfully to something deep, dark, and primeval in the human soul.

I would argue that what Sally Mann and Joel Peter-Witkin do in terms of art is much more profound by a factor of ten than what you see in a typical, say, David Muench landscape.

But, what would you actually put on your living room wall? I would say, hands down, you would pick the Muench landscape, because it is so spectacular and gorgeous–and it matches the sofa so nicely.

Is there anything wrong with selecting your home art using such criteria? None at all, really. After all, you have to live in that space. It is a lot easier to live with beauty than with darkness. As long as we all realize that there are other forms of photographic art out there that really push the frontiers…photographic art that delves into more profound questions about who we really are and why we are here.

Taking all this into account, maybe now you could see fit to at least reserve a spot on a wall in an obscure closet of your home for a Mann, a Peter-Witkin, or something akin?