Criticising Photographs - Introduction

I'm planning to write a series of articles about the process of criticising photographs. This is based on my own experience of thinking about photographs and my approach to the whole genre. I'm probably not going to come up with anything original, and I owe a lot to others whose writings I've studied, but nonetheless it may be of interest to other photographers who are similarly trying to understand their chosen art.

First let's get that bothersome word criticism out of the way. Most people associate the word with purely negative commentary ("he criticised the way I did things.. etc") however for me and most others the process of criticising artwork is more one of understanding. There may be an evaluation of the work in question, but not necessarily.

So why not use the phrase "understanding photographs?". Good question, but I think it's a bit presumptious, and it also implies that there is an absolute objective view of the work that can be arrived at by some empirical process. This of course is not the case, and the "meaning" of many works of art is ambiguous and keeps scholars and critics fully engaged. "Appreciating photographs" could also be considered, but it sounds a bit lightweight and superficial to me. So we're stuck with "criticising" unless someone can suggest something better to me.

In the next article, I'll get started by asking the question "Why bother?"