Waiting for the e-mail can be a brain-numbing experience.
It’s not like going to your mailbox at home – if the mailman has arrived and all you see in the mailbox are bills and Valpak coupons, and nothing from the judges, then you grit your teeth and say to yourself, “Maybe I’ll hear tomorrow.”
But an e-mail – well, that can arrive at any time of the day or night. It can also arrive in your regular e-mail box or it could get re-routed, by accident, into your spam filters.
So I’m waiting. Waiting waiting waiting. My five pictures for the Albany Institute of History and Art’s Mohawk-Hudson Regionals are up for judging. The e-mail I’m supposed to receive will tell me which – if any – of my photos are eligible to be produced and framed and ready for physical judging. Right now, the judges are working off the five images I sent via a CD. And my photos are being judged alongside paintings and sculptures and other visual arts.
I quickly check.
It’s from the Institute.
This is the e-mail I’ve been waiting for. Finally.
I quickly open the e-mail.
Uh-oh. The letter starts out, “Dear Artist.” Any time the salutation is “Dear Artist” or “Dear Contributor” or “Dear we couldn’t be bothered to put your surname on this line,” it’s not good news.
And here are the results.
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THE LAST TOURIST
Rejected. I’m telling you, after that rejection I kinda feel like this restaurant. Empty and abandoned. |
| BOND CLOTHES
Rejected. Man, I can’t catch a break. Not a single break. |
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NIPPER’S POLAR PANORAMA
Rejected. Don’t tell me I used up all this photo’s mojo at the New York State Fair? |
| COCA-COLA RELIEVES FATIGUE
Rejected. Maybe I shouldn’t have submitted two split-film pictures. Grr. |
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THE RAILSPLITTER
Rejected. That’s just cruel. No love for Kodachrome? |
So let’s see what happened here. I’ve entered ten pictures in two regional competitions.
And I’ve gone zero-for-ten this year. A figure worse than Bluto Blutarsky’s grade point average.
And this is worse – this time, my photos didn’t even make it past the initial judging. It’s like the person trying out for American Idol and not even getting into the building.
This is bad. And it feels even worse.
And not only that… but if I can’t even get my pictures in one of the regionals…
Do I even have a chance this summer at Altamont?
Chuck The Writer 
> But an e-mail – well, that can arrive at any time of
> the day or night. It can also arrive in your regular e-mail box
> or it could get re-routed, by accident, into your spam filters
Or your first name is spelled stupidly, say, like Sebastien, and they send an email to the other guy, Sebastian, also known as, “oblivion”, or “where the emails go to die”. That’s how I never heard of my photos for the Photo Regional 🙂
Anyway. Sorry to hear that, but you understand what’s going on here, right? (see our previous answers)
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Not much to add about the photos that I didn’t say in your previous post (really, two posts about this?). Just don’t forget that this is a completely different audience than things like county fairs. I’ll go out on a limb and say that if you took a random sample of the photos that do get presented in the Mo-Hud, they would probably not fare that well in the competitions you’ve entered in the past. Which makes sense because these shows are not competitions, which is something you probably shouldn’t lose sight of.
These types of shows just present a different style of work. I’m not going to make a judgement call and say whether “different’ means “better” or not. In the end I think we’d all benefit from seeing you stick to your convictions and produce the kind of work you want to than to shift your output to something you don’t enjoy producing as much but has a better chance in a certain gallery. I don’t know if you want to be an artist, but I can’t think of any good artists who do that.
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