Daddy, where are you?
brings together over 70 photographs by Tierney Gearon. Set mainly in and around her mother’s home, the ostensible subject of Gearon’s ongoing series is the interaction between Gearon, her children and mother. Yet Gearon’s beautiful but strikingly raw photographs also narrate a story with a more expansive emotional force. It tells of the closeness as well as the profound distance between our loved ones and us. It is this psychological tension as well as her direct confrontation with one of photography’s enduring themes that distinguishes her from her contemporaries. Daddy, Where Are You? combines revealing tableaux, garnered from Gearon’s observations of family outings and routines, with a sequence of portraits of her mother. Together they capture the impossibility of truly understanding the full nature of those we love.
a review uit;
http://5b4.blogspot.com/2007/07/daddy-where-are-you-by-tierney-gearon.html
Daddy, Where Are You? by Tierney Gearon
Tierney Gearon has always raised red flags with her photographs. In 2001 while her show was on exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery in London, the police threatened to charge her as a child pornographer. Many of her images were of her naked children at play. The threat of those charges was dropped after much of the British press came to her defense.
In her new book Daddy Where Are You? Published by Steidldangin, she again faces some controversy. This time, the question of exploitation has been raised. A documentary called The Mother Project by Peter Sutherland and Jack Youngelson takes a look at Gearon and these controversies.
In this work, Gearon has been photographing her mother who suffers from mental illness. The book on which this work is realized raises many questions about the relationship between mother and daughter and in these images; those stereotypical roles seem to have been reversed due to the illness. Tierney is now the authority figure and the mother is now the child so to speak. The mother is now the one that has to be reminded that good girls do not lift up their skirts and that boundaries should exist.
When I first looked at the book, I saw a photographer taking advantage of a fruitful opportunity; an eccentric woman, Tierney’s ill mother, living in a somewhat squalid home. Along with this opportunity was the added advantage of a ‘cover’ if questioned. For Gearon, she isn’t taking advantage of her mother’s situation and illness to make a set of pictures she will benefit from, she is “exploring a relationship,” albeit a complicated one. After her London show, Gearon reflected that that experience with the police “made me question whether I was a good mother.” Well, this new project gave her the opportunity to explore “motherhood” (or daughterhood) with an obviously visually arresting subject.
Normally I wouldn’t be questioning this. Please dear readers do not get the impression that I have much of a problem with being an opportunist. No matter how much I write about exploitation, I photograph in the streets and “use” people as my photographic fodder on a daily basis. As I have explained before, photographs are fictions, they may represent facts as seen within a brief slice of time, but the reading of those facts is mostly fiction. Photographs are quite separate from absolute truth.
That being said, I raise these issues here because Gearon asks us to. Throughout her work she is pushing buttons. Before it was, for example, a photo like below.
A prepubescent boy with his pants pulled down pissing towards the camera while in the background, another child sucks their thumb. This is definitely ‘clear cutting’ a path to a disturbing thought process for the viewer. It gets rather “dodgy” as the English say. In another photo, a naked child (innocence) wears a mask of an evil looking pig (anything but innocent). That photograph is about knowledge and experience placed in contrast to a naked child’s body. Sorry Tierney, although I agree that the response of potential criminal charges was unnecessary, you were begging for it to be heeded and thus challenged. The same “act of exploration” in Daddy, Where Are You? is challenging a response. Take a look, ‘exploitation’ and ‘exploration’ follow one another in the dictionary.
What we do have in Daddy, Where Are You?, is a set of relatively well made photographs of an older woman who seems like a joyous free spirit (if we didn’t have the knowledge of her illness). Kind of like a dash of Larry Sultan and a jigger of Grey Gardens. I like the work best when Tierney isn’t leading her mother into situations that are extreme. She is able to pull off many remarkable images. Her sense of timing is great.
Tierney’s mother is unpredictable. Although there is no example of violence, when Tierney introduces her new born baby into the mix, the frailty of the child is stressed. In one image, the mother dons a Halloween skeleton mask and grimaces towards the camera while a child screams crying with fear. (Note to photographers: Leave the masks at home unless you plan on knocking off your local bank. Its too easy.) A different image in the book similarly refers to the darker side of her mother’s personality like the mask image but doesn’t resort to such attention getting tactics. A young boy looks wearily at the grandmother while holding a smiling infant. The young boy seems to be protecting the infant from the smiling grandmother figure. This is a much more frightening image to me than the one with the silly Halloween mask.
One other path the book walks is looking at the photographs as if it may be a premonition of what the future has in store. Often Tierney directly compares her body with her mothers and at times their behavior is interchangeable. Will Tierney suffer like her mother later in life? Who knows? What we are privy to, brings a certain amount of discomfort. Tierney’s internal question of whether she is “a good mother” is expressed perfectly as she photographs her new born crawling along alone in the street in front of the mother’s house.
Another button pushing moment that appears both in the book and documentary is one in which Tierney wants to make a shot of her mother nude and looking like she is breast feeding a new born baby. In the documentary, Tierney questions whether the shot is going to “look dodgy” as she photographs the scene inside of a barn. A version of the photo done outside of the barn appears in the book. Well, yes Tierney, it is dodgy. You know it was dodgy (that’s why you said what you said) and knew it would be perceived as such. This type of photograph brings the book down a notch. There are many images that seem to lead in this direction that we could do without. Her points are being made with more eloquent and poetic images.
When charges of exploitation are raised, we often look for the damage done. Was Gearon’s first project that featured her naked children damaging to them? In the film The Mother Project, those same children seem confident, well adjusted and at times, able to express themselves in ways that are not only intelligent but remarkably poetic. They are free spirits but do not seem reckless. Tierney’s picture making to them was mostly fun (although the son remarks that the process of being photographed is boring.)
Her mother’s comments on the work range from complaining that her daughter is making her “look crazy” to saying that every photo Tierney makes is beautiful. Many of them are. What I wonder about is where Gearon will go next. I hope she matures past being controversial. In my opinion, it is only weighing her down.
The book is on the Dangin imprint from Steidl. It’s 11X14 trim size allows the photographs to reproduce at a nice large size. It is well printed. The sequence is arranged according to the seasons. We start in the summer and make our way through winter and into the warmth of the following spring. Gearon loves to photograph in the golden hour so many of the images are seductive with their warm yellow hues.
The documentary, The Mother Project is also very well done. I was skeptical that the subject could sustain a full length film but it does and never seems hollow or dull. Made over a period of four years it probes into Gearon’s process of picture making, unconventional family relationships and the controversy that has surrounded her work. It is distributed by Zeitgeist Films and will be available on DVD in September.
www.zeitgeistvideo.com
Nog meer van www.tearneygearon.com:
Tierney Gearon's photographs of her children have elicited admiration and controversy in equal amounts. Here she talks to art critic Martin Herbert about artistic detachment, working with her family, and how to capture fleeting moments.
Martin Herbert: What was the origin of this current body of work?
Tierney Gearon: I've always been a photographer, and about two years ago l was going through really tough marital problems: I went through an identity crisis, really. I used to do a lot of painting, drawing and sculpture, just anything creative, and I suppressed that when I got married to a very bourgeois Frenchman. He's a really amazing person, but I entered a world that had nothing to do with what I was about, and I didn't really know who I was anymore.
And so two, maybe three years ago I started to document my family. People, especially Americans, are so busy digging up their own roots that they don't take the time to notice who's living around them, who's still alive. America's such a big melting pot, socially and economically, white and black, poor people to millionaires, and it's interesting when you have all that in one family. That's how I started, and it actually made me feel grounded to who I am as a person, which was fantastic.
So how has it changed over the years?
I have different ways of working, and I use different cameras. It's not like when you're a painter, where you usually have a particular style of working. Photography is a magical tool because anyone can take a good picture, and it could be an accident. I wanted to get better quality images, so I started wondering how I could do large-format negatives - with their endless, pin-sharp detail - but still retain the spontaneity of my snapshots. I discovered a lightweight large-format camera and started getting a different quality: the moment became more like a painting. It's actually not easy to do. A lot of photographers who use large-format cameras make very static pictures, and that's what I think is the edge to my pictures - they really feel like stilled moments. In the beginning, I got my images accidentally, but I subsequently learned how to be ready for the interesting moments.
Do you tend to stage your images more now?
No, I never stage anything. Nothing is retouched, I don't do any cropping, and I never set anything up. I know when the moment's going to come now; I can see it coming. I'm looking for something that happens to everyone, a captured moment in time that has a twist or hidden meaning to it, that can lead the mind to different things. There's a layering of meanings in there.
What about the masks? Surely that's a contrived aspect?
Well, I use elements, but I don't tell anybody where to stand or what to do, and if they don't want to, say, wear the mask, then they won't do it. I might introduce a birthday cake, or say 'let's go for a walk on the beach', because I know that something might happen there. That's the only way that I might set something up. It's become a challenge for me to take a simple, nothing moment and turn it into something significant.
The use of masks in the image with the tractor - Untitled, from 2000 - really struck me. The mask somehow brings you closer to the character, even though it is hiding something.
I know what you're saying. That particular picture is how the mask images started: it was a Mexican mask of my mother-in-laws, and the kids used to pick them up and walk around like that, and it was so funny looking, and it was totally natural. The masks really change the person. But I think I'm done with masks now...
Working with your own family, how do you maintain a sense of distance?
What's funny is, when you look at my immediate family projects they're actually quite impersonal. I started to look at my pictures and realized they could have been anybody's children. Maybe you saw my son's face in one picture, but that's it. It's not about who the person is - it's about the feeling they create.
When you look at the work of contemporary photographers like Sally Mann, or Nan Goldin, or Richard Billingham, you look at the people in the pictures, and you really get to know that person. The odd thing about my pictures - and I only realized this after all this controversy happened* [see below] - is that you have no idea who that person really is. They're very impersonal, unsentimental photographs. Even Hiroshi Sugimoto's photos of waxworks are about the person, and that's eerie because they are wax figures! I think people have heard that I photograph my family, so they assume the images must be intimate. But actually my pictures are very detached, almost filmic.
[*On 8th March, 2001, Gearon's photographs - while exhibiting at London's Saatchi Gallery - were cited in a report by the Obscene Publications Unit of the Metropolitan Police, prompting a media frenzy over State censorship of the arts. A week later, the Crown Prosecution Service dismissed the case.]
But don't you think that's precisely why some people have a problem with them?
Well, I think that might be it, actually. When I've read reviews and critiques of these photos that say they're disturbing, that might be why they think so - because they really aren't family photos. I think Charles [Saatchi] was having a bit of fun when he called them snapshots, and he got me calling them snapshots. And then when all the trouble happened, he said, these aren't family snapshots, these are disturbing images! To say that they are family images puts an edge on them, but they have absolutely nothing to do with my family. What's interesting is, I thought I could only take those pictures because they were members of my family, but some of the images portray people who aren't members of my family - they're the children of friends of mine, or people we don't even know.
How much do you take on board what your children might think of your project?
A lot, actually. When I did these pictures, I thought, if these ever end up anywhere, they're going to be so proud - of me and also of themselves. And when all this gallery stuff happened to me, I thought, maybe they're going to grow up and some of their images will be on the walls of a museum. And they'll be like, 'Hey, that's me!' The funny thing is, you can't really see them anyway. But at least they can say, 'I'm part of that'.
It's difficult having a mother who's an artist, because I'm not a stable, nine-to-five person. The household that I was brought up in, though, was much more dysfunctional than the one that they're growing up in, so they're probably going to be much more stable. Someone interviewed me, and said, don't you have a problem that your children might not want to see these pictures of themselves when they get older, going through their teenage years? I said, look at them; if you feel embarrassed by something that your mom might show to one of your friends, you've got issues that you need to sort out.
But there's a difference between friends and total strangers.
Yes, but if you're proud of yourself, whether it's a stranger or a friend, what difference does it make? You're not baring your soul, they're just photographs. They're not of your first kiss with your boyfriend. If I took a video of my daughter being teased at school, that would be a really horrible, humiliating thing, but these pictures aren't humiliating. They might be eerie, but that's their power. My son peeing - big deal, men pee all the time, they still do it, but I want him to grow up never feeling ashamed of that. If you make a child feel ashamed of something, then that creates doubt - and that is a problem of your own making.
Has the controversy obscured the dynamics of the work, do you think?
Well, people look at them differently. But you can't see who the kids are, and I'm not telling them what to do. What really shocked me was that some artists said 'you are so lucky, you can't pay for press like that', and I looked at them like 'you are sick'. I'm a mother first, then an artist, and if I knew that these pictures would create even 2% of this kind of controversy, I would never have done anything with them. I look at them and think they're funny - twisted and eerie, yes, but in a funny way, not in a bad way. I didn't think people would see something so dark in them. It was never because of the nudity, for instance; it was something else people were seeing, something in their own psyche.
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