Using diverse approaches, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ron Jude and Guillaume Simoneau share a view of what it means to navigate personal histories through photographic documentation. Tinged with voyeurism, their works invite active and individual engagement with these intensely personal stories of coming of age.
The three artists featured in this exhibition—
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ron Jude, and Guillaume
Simoneau—tell autobiographical stories by
intertwining personal narrative with the social,
political, and cultural conditions of place.
Although they draw from their personal archives and
backstories, their work is not entirely factual or diary-
like. Instead they make projects that provide both
specific and universal commentary—their individual
histories becoming conduits for exploring collective
experience. They also probe the fleeting, ineffable
nature of the past and present, as they investigate
the capacity of photography to at once promote and
destabilize our sense of individual identity.
Our relationships to both photography and the
idea of the personal narrative have significantly
changed in recent years, due in large part to the
markedly increasing accessibility of information and
the shifting concepts of space, time, and location
brought about by new technologies. We share
our personal stories quickly and in real time via
smartphones and online social networks, indulging
both our inner showoff and voyeur. The artists in
this exhibition reflect the fluidity of our information-
saturated world by mixing personal and communal
histories and blurring the boundaries between
the individual and the collective. Yet they address
personal narrative in a slower, more deliberate,
and more poetic way than electronic forms of
communication typically allow, in works that are
carefully authored, engagingly ambiguous, and
deeply felt.
Just a few decades ago, in the 1980s and 1990s,
artists like Nan Goldin and Richard Billingham
redefined autobiographical photography by taking
extremely revealing, at times shocking, pictures of
their family and friends in a seemingly casual manner,
and then placing their pictures in the formal settings
of museums and galleries. The raw honesty of their
approach and perceived looseness in their style (from
the tradition of the “snapshot aesthetic”) departed
radically from the more classical approaches to
documenting personal histories employed by artists
such as Harry Callahan, Edward Weston, and many
others who preceded them. Fast-forward a few
decades to an era where there are boundless virtual
opportunities for self-projection, and exhibitionism
turns rampant. Although no less poignant, works like
those by Billingham and Goldin, or the more recent
work of Frazier, Jude, and Simoneau, may now seem
like a particularly measured approach to telling a
personal story.
The last few decades have also seen
sweeping shifts in attitudes toward the very idea
of documentary practice. Postmodern theory
taught us to analyze and distrust the motives of
the photographer and lobbed profound challenges
at photography’s ability to capture any sort of
phenomenological reality. We are living in what some
theorists and artists refer to as a “post-documentary”
era. To be sure, photographic artists of today like
Frazier, Jude, and Simoneau understand that
documentation is changing and inherently subjective.
Most of them work comfortably with the assumption
that photography is both evidentiary and illusory.
Artists also fully grasp the power dynamics of the
camera (which can be used as shield and probe
alike), as well as the malleable, unfixed nature of both
books, based on his home state of Idaho. The first
chapter is Alpine Star (2006), a project made using
the photographic subject and its interpretation.
Ron Jude (American, b. 1965) has created a
trilogy of projects, all originally conceptualized as
photographs culled exclusively from his hometown
newspaper, The Star News. Jude grew up in McCall,
Idaho, a small town in mid-state with a population
of 2,900 people that swells to over 10,000 in
the summer. In this project, Jude selects images
that range from the mundane to the oddball, and
masterfully sequences them for heightened impact,
enhancing their mystery by omitting captions and
context. The book has no text; the images intended
to illustrate journalistic prose have been equalized—
printed in black and white, often with the newsprint
half-tone pattern visible. A collapsed bridge, sports,
the wilderness, and various headshots and snapshots
form a random assortment of images that ultimately
invite an ascription of oblique strangeness to small
town Idaho.
In the second chapter, emmett (2010), Jude
resurrects and reprints photographs he took as a
teenager in the 1980s to investigate the past as an
idea and recognize the incomprehensible nature of
self and place. Conveying scenes such as drag racing,
teenagers, forests, rainbows, and lightning, the
images reflect the cultural and sociological specificity
of his teenage years—growing up in an isolated small
town enclosed by nature long before the era of the
Internet. Jude evokes and recontextualizes these
experiences in the present so that they also tell a
new and ambiguous story that reflects his changing
relationship to the photographs and the events
and memories they convey over time. Indeed, Jude
characterizes the viewer’s experience of the project
as echoing the process of trying to piece together
personal stories from slivers of memory with the
aid of photographic documents. To this end, he
repeats motifs, bringing the viewer back to the same
subject again and again in a way that counters
narrative progression. As he explains, “We build
linear narratives about our lives, our relationships-our entire sense of ourselves—out of incomplete
fragments. Photographs not only give us a false
sense of the past, but they get in the way of deeper
reflection. They act as verifiable, sentimentalized
proof of something that doesn’t exist.”1
The trilogy ends with Lick Creek Line (2012), an
enigmatic photo essay about a fur trapper in Idaho
that dances on the divide between documentation
and fiction. In these pictures, a romantic, perhaps
nostalgic, conception of the State of Idaho as a place
where people live simple lives in untamed wilderness
bumps up against more sinister stereotypes of
backwoods characters who kill animals, wear plaid,
and live in shacks full of dusty bottles, stuffed animal
heads, and bloody instruments that attest to their
hunting prowess. Jude also documents the reality of a
natural landscape that is being continually blemished
by new developments in pictures of a chairlift running
across the tree canopy, a new housing development,
and a wooden railing at the edge of a patio whose
intricate design distracts from the grand mountain
landscape behind it. Throughout the series, old
competes with new, wilderness with the human
attempt to tame it, and the overall lack of narrative
arc encourages our reading of the project to vacillate
between fact and fantasy.
Also returning to the place of her childhood,
LaToya Ruby Frazier (American, b. 1982)
has spent the last twelve years extensively
documenting the economic and social struggles
of her family and community in her hometown of
Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her pictures are bluntly
autobiographical, showing her grandmother, her
mother, and herself—three generations of women
whose familial history traces the decline of industrial
American cities. Frazier’s grandmother lived in Braddock when it was home to a vibrant and prosperous steel industry, her mother witnessed the closing of many steel mills and the subsequent economic catastrophe, and Frazier watched members of her community succumb to drug addiction, poverty, and terminal illness caused by massive industrial pollution. Photographs made by Frazier—sometimes in collaboration with or authored by her mother—tell the family story. A dialog about identity as it pertains to self, family, and community emerges alongside a nuanced portrait of the shifting circumstances of blue-collar America within this project. To create this narrative, Frazier blends two approaches—social documentary photography and conceptual art—and characterizes complex, intergenerational struggles as both participant and author. In addition to her still photographs, Frazier has made videos both in collaboration with her mother and individually, as seen in Self-Portrait (United States Steel) (2010), where a solemn, barechested Frazier deeply breathes in and out in one frame next to an image of a steel mill pumping out toxins in another, creating an unnerving commentary on social inequality and pollution.
Like Frazier, Guillaume Simoneau (Canadian, b. 1978) chronicles an intimate relationship as both a form of diary and as a reflection on wider societal and political issues. His project Love and War (2011) tracks his on-again, off-again relationship with a woman named Caroline Annandale. Simoneau first met Annandale at the Maine Photographic Workshop in 2000. Both in their early twenties, they began an intense, youthful relationship and traveled the world together just prior to September 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks on the United States, Annandale enlisted in the US army and was sent to Iraq. The two grew apart, Annandale eventually marrying someone else, but they reunited several years later upon her return from war to begin a tumultuous second chapter in their relationship. Using a variety of images, including pictures he took when they first met, photographs Annandale emailed home from Iraq, text messages, and handwritten notes, Simoneau charts the couple’s love affair and its attendant ups and downs, but not in chronological order. Sequenced to mimic the disjointed nature of memory, communication, and identity, the project reveals how our ideas about ourselves and of our loved ones are always a blend of past and present. As the photographs accumulate, they expose Annandale’s loss of innocence and her transformation into a toughened war veteran. Ultimately, Simoneau reveals the lasting impact—the invisible, indelible, and irreversible effects that both love and war have on people’s lives.
Using diverse approaches, the artists in this exhibition share an expansive, fluid view of what it means to navigate personal histories through photographic documentation. Tinged with voyeurism and saturated with an awareness of our desire to connect with others, their works invite active and individual engagement with these intensely personal, yet universal, stories of coming of age, the place we come from, and the people important to us. In this way they reveal an even deeper experience of personal narrative that exists not in the social or in the collective, but in our interior realm, where we seek to understand our individual selves, often through the stories of others.
1- Ron Jude, Double Feature: Ed Panar and Ron Jude Talk About Books, http://www.ahornmagazine.com/issue_7
Karen Irvine,
Curator and Associate Director
The MoCP is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
The Museum is generously supported by Columbia College Chicago, the MoCP Advisory Board,
individuals, private and corporate foundations, and government agencies including the Illinois Arts
Council, a state agency.
Generous support for Backstory has been provided by David Knaus.
Image: Guillaume Simoneau, Caroline, Kennesaw, Georgia, 2008. 38 x 48 inches, C-print. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Gift of the artist
For press inquiries, please contact Karen Irvine: kirvine@colum.edu
Museum of Contemporary Photography
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