cloud-swimmer

[cloud-swimmer]

Intimate Life In Photography

The Photograph as Contemporary Art - Chapter 5 Intimate Life

- By Charlotte Cotton

“The use of seemingly unskilled photography is an intentional device that signals the intimacy of the relationship between the photographer and his/her subjects.”

Family images are usually taken at symbolic points in family life --- a dramatic / symbolic moments, with loved ones, usually staged. “What remains absent in such images, however, are things we perceive as culturally mundane or taboo.”

Art photography substitutes the flip-side of expected scenarios and takes as its subjects the non-events of daily life: sleeping, waiting, being bored, and uncommunicative.

Starting in the late 1980s, the stylistic signs in art practice has made its way into fashion photography. The fashion industry began to absorb these anti-commercial gestures into its advertising, and borrowed the aesthetic strategy from art photography in intimate life. However, without the authenticity of the photographers’ biography, fashion photography was bound to be the target of social campaign. 

Some influential photographers in intimate life:

Nan Goldin

The personal is the universal

“Goldin was consciously sequencing her photographs into themes that directed the viewer to think beyond the specifics of her subjects; lives and about general narratives of universal experience.”

Compared to social documentary, “...her intimate photographs are a genuine record of a personal life and not simply pseudo-empathetic observation.”

Nobuyoshi Araki 荒木经惟

“Araki's photographs of young Japanese women 􀇔re seen as a visual diary of his sexual life, for he clams to have had sex with most of the women depicted. His images are often seen as a kind of photographic foreplay, rather than a detached and exploitative voyeurism.”

Larry Clark - Tulsa (1971) & Tennage Lust (1983)

In Tulsa, Clark “...centre on a self-destructive combination of sex, drugs and guns in the hands of out-of-control young people. Tulsa contains grainy black-and-white photographs taken by Clark throughout his twenties, starting in 1963 [134]. They are hfs most strictly autobiographical works as they diaristically document his youth and that of his friends.”

Ryan McGinley

With full awareness of the traditions within the established genre of intimate photography, McGinley’s work shows a lack of angst and pathos apparent in earlier intimate photography, substituted by a knowing playfulness in collaboration with his subjects to help shape the narratives.

Larry Sultan  (b. 1964)

Sultan grew up in a suburban in California, which later became a source of inspiration for many of his projects. His famous project, Pictures from Home, vividly depicts the his family history and parents’ relationships. In his most recent work, Homeland, Sultan photographed the outskirts of a suburbs --- the marginal spaces and transitional zones invisible to most of people. These were the places where the young Sultan used to enjoy a piece of freedom. Sultan hired day laborers as actors for the landscape photographs and directed their action, drawing from sources such as his own childhood wanderings and their experiences as exiles.

Antioch Creek, 2018  |  Homeland, Larry Sultan

I am very intrigued by Sultan’s works, especially Homeland. The displacement in Sultan’s series of photos results in provocative dramas that provokes reminiscent emotions and thoughts about home. 

I feel I can deeply relate to the subject matter, the nostalgic transitional terrain, he worked on. These places do not provide very “useful” functions other than connecting places that can be named. They are the ambiguous zones that are invisible to most of people who are actively engaged in our modern society. However, these unnamed places are the dreamlands for children living around. I can remembered these anonymous places I hang out a lot when I was a kid --- a deserted beach on the way to my school with a sewer’s exit (my friends and I had lots of imagination about what inside the sewer), the empty grass field behind our neighborhood unit, etc. As I grew up, however, I went to school; I went to work; I hung out at places you can find their names and locations on Google map. Sultan’s photos of those marginal spaces he sought out as a child remind me of my personal childhood and make me think about the modernization of spaces and lifestyle. 

Today these places are occupied by the exile workers who travelled all the way from home in order to make a living. I found the juxtaposition is so interesting, especially when I think about the young Sultan and the exile workers shared these marginal spaces. While Sultan calls it home, the workers sitting under the same tree, longing for his home. What is the memory they have about this pace?  And what are they in common to share this space?  What make children like Sultan left this place? And what makes these workers come to this place?