Photography as Contemporary Art - Chapter 5 - Intimate Life

I think this is one of the least interesting chapters to me, although Ithe more I see of this type of work, the more I warm to it. The chapter talks about the style of photography which capture the day-to-day, confessional, activities and interactions of people as they live their lives. It's highly subjective and as the title of the chapter suggests - intimate. The photography is typically unpremeditated and almost snapshot - many of the pictures look like they're taken from a family album (and that's why I find them difficult to appreciate). However, this seeming lack of care for technical precision is use to enhance the intimacy.

One key difference with the family snapshot is that it usually focuses on key life events. But here the subjects are captured in their most normal, unromantic settings. The photographs will often deal with taboos, or subcultures.

Nan Goldin is the most obvious and well publicised photographer who fits into this mould. She didn't take photographs with art in mind, her photographs don't purport to be anything other what they were - her attempt to capture the day to day lives of herself and her friends. My concern (and one referenced in the book itself, is that those photographers who hav come after her were not so innocent of the artistic and commercial value of their work and so therefore the work becomes more pre-conceived, contrived and therefore less intimate.

I guess one of the reasons that I feel this way about this photography is that I was a bit of fan of the Face (and similar), magazines in the 90's and I witnessed the proliferation of this imagery for the purposes of fashion photography (the book references this also), and the associated development of the 'heroin chic' look. This was fine at the time, but I find it difficult to take seriously now. "The fashionable" and "the cool" are inherently at odds with art for me.

What to me is more interesting is later in the chapter when we come to artists such as Ryan McGinley who are more knowingly and openly playing with photography as a means of enabling a group of people to present themselves in a certain way and create their own narrative - for consumption by others. The work Japanese artists Hiromix and Yang Yong falls into the same camp.

I also think where photography comes to be used as a means of documenting aspects of family life - almost as a means of self-therapy - are also interesting.

Larry Sultan  combines new work combined with family snaps, film footage and transcribed conversations to tell his families story and history.

Colin Gray's work to study and understand his parents relationship as their health deterioriates in old age seems genuine, heartfelt and unpretentious.