"The Photograph as Contemporary Art" - Chapter 5: Intimate life - Learning points

The course material includes also "The Photograph as Contemporary Art", a very interesting book written by Charlotte Cotton published by Thames and Hudson (London 2014 Third edition). As I decided to do for my practical course, I would like to keep track of my learning points as I gradually go on reading the book reporting the most important sentences by the above author.
No copyright infringement intended - photographs will be removed immediately upon request.


This chapter looks at how narratives of domestic and intimate life have been presented in contemporary art photography.
The use of seemingly unskilled photography is an intentional device that signals the intimacy of the relationship between the photographer and his or her subject.
This kind of art photography, on the other hand, while embellishing the aesthetics of family snaps, often substitutes the emotional flip-side for their expected scenarios: sadness, disputes, addiction and illnesses.
It also takes as its subjects the nonevents of daily life: sleeping, talking on the phone, traveling by car, being bored and uncommunicative.

Nan Goldin sets the standards by which intimate photography and its creators are judged.
Goldin's first photographs, which she took in her late teens, were a series of black and white images entitled "Drag Queens" which empathetically portrayed the daily lives of two drag queens with whom she lived and their social circle.
In her " The Ballade of Sexual Dependency" she states the phycological necessity for her to make photographs of her loved ones.
Her description of the effect of her sister's suicide at the age of eighteen vividly justifies the sense of urgency with which she photographs what is emotionally significant to her, as a way of holding onto her own version of her history.
In the early 1990's, with the publication of "I'll be your mirror", Goldin's photographs of those around her counterbalanced celebration with loss.
Her intense record of the impact of HIV and AIDS-related illness, drug addiction and rehabilitation on her and her friends's lives offered art audiences a profound engagement with these social issues, spelt out in personal terms.
"The other side" showed transvestites and transexuals in cities she visited.
Goldin's photographs reached the art world almost serendipitously: her initial motivation was to take these photographs for personal reasons rather than to make a high-profile career as a photographer.

Nan Goldin - Greer and Robert on the bed - 1953

Larry Clark's books "Tulsa", "Teenage Lust" and "The Perfect Childhood" are all centred on a self-destructive combination of sex, drugs and guns in the hands of out-of-control young people.

The sense of Clark's being an insider, recording the teenagers' nihilistic progress into adulthood, is emphasised in an essay in which he both describes experiences from his own life that mirror the events in his photographs and declares his motivation as an adult to take the photographs he wished he had made as a child.

Larry Clark - Untitled - 1972

Corinne Day published a personal chronicle of her life in the late 1990s, focusing on the period when she suffered a life-threatening seizure that led to hospitalisation and the discovery of a brain tumour.

In "Diary" images of Day in the hospital leading up to an operation to remove the tumour and her recovery appears like staccato notes through the book sequence of photographs of the highs and lows of her social circle.

Corinne Day - Untitled - 2000

Corinne Day - Tara Sitting on the Loo -1995, 2000

The meteoric rise of British artist Richard Billingham began in the early 1990s when he started to create a memorable record of his family life.

"Ray's a Laugh" was published with a minimal amount of text and a high-impact sequence of images of Ray (his father) drinking home-brewed beer and falling over, Liz (his mother) and Ray fighting, and Jason (his brother) playing computer games, all in their cramped and untidy council flat in the West Midlands.

Richard Billingham - Untitled - 1994

American artist Larry Sultan published his book "Pictures from Home" in 1992.
The book is an evocative study of his mother and father.
some of the photographs are posed, and Sultan describes these as images he traded or negotiated with his parents as he won their agreement to be photographed while their undertook household chores.

Larry Sultan - Argument at the Kitchen Table - 1986 

When talking about his formative experiences of photography, Colin Gray describes the camera as being a symbolic control over, and way of visualising, the bonds within his family.

The series marks the shifts in his old parents routines, such as the increasing number of visits they make to hospitals and to their church.

Colin Gray - In Sickness And In Health - 2002