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| Billingham: Ray's a Laugh |
Chapter Five: Intimate Life reviews the rather ironic affectation of a vernacular style as an attempt to convey a sense of the opposite – the real, the genuine, the unaffected. What sets this apart from the typical vernacular is atypical subject matter. Where family snaps create a sense of normalcy through images of rites of passages and moments of celebration, the photographers described here point the camera at disjuncture, failure, addiction, illness, anomie. The work of American Nan Goldin is cited as seminal, a decades long project recording and exhibiting relationships with family, friends, and other intimates. Her intention was apparently genuinely vernacular in the sense that she did not aspire to a career as an artist but simply to share work with her subjects. Aesthetically I find little attractive in her images, but appreciate her bravery in exposing herself, as well as her commitment to an extended period of recording. I would love to see a copy of
Ray’s a Laugh, a precursor of reality TV in photobook produced by British artist Richard Billingham as source material for his painting and chronicling the life of his dysfunctional family, all shot in vibrant color with lots of hot flash, reminiscent of William Eggleston (who surprisingly doesn’t rate a mention in this chapter). The book is now out of print and commands $150-200 used. Please. One other project here that struck me was Breda Beban’s
Miracle of Death, a series of images of her husband’s boxed ashes, a rumination on death and grieving. This doesn’t seem to have been published in book form (Cotton’s citation does not include a book) and aside from a handful of small images doesn’t appear much in internet searches.
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| Beban: Miracle of Death |
In
Chapter Six: Moments in History Cotton reviews the use of a contemplative approach to documentary. She begins by asking a question loaded with assumption:
How do photographers move from a critique of image-making that implies the loss of the documentary power to a practice that utilizes art strategies to maintain the social relevance of the photograph?
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| Graham: American Night |
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| Graham: American Night |
Firstly, it is not clear that an awareness of the photographic process robs documentary of its power, any more than awareness of film-making robs the movie of its power to entertain, inspire and inform. The bigger threat to documentary photography was television and video. It is also not clear that “art strategies” are in any meaningful way relevant to society at large (though they may be writ large by a coterie of art critics). Given that many of the photographers working in this vein used medium and large format cameras, they were not involved in the thick of events, but most often arrived later to document the aftermath, from bombed-out cities to refugee camps. One critical crossover was employment of the deadpan style outlined in Chapter Two, an attempt to establish a neutral viewpoint. Here Cotton cites the work of photographers who engaged their subjects in controlling their presentation before the camera. A couple of projects caught my attention here, including Paul Graham’s
American Night, a collection of contrasting images made up alternatively of bleached photos of lone black Americans walking through urban landscapes, juxtaposed with full-color images of suburban houses absent any people. For
Case History, Boris Mikhailov recorded over 500 images of the homeless in post-Soviet Ukraine, paying his subjects to pose, sometimes as religious or historical figures.
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| Mikhailov: Case History |
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