The Photograph as Contemporary Art: chapter 5

Intimate Life

In intimate photography, "the technical shortcomings of domestic non-art photography are employed as a language through which private experience is communicated to the viewer." Not sure I really believe that this is as deliberate as  Cotton suggests; more likely that the technical quality of many of the images is questionable, and this argument is used as something of a justification.

Nan Goldin is most well-known intimate life photographer. She was a drug addict, had a traumatic childhood (her sister committed suicide at 18 when Goldin was 11),  and had a destructive sexual relationship that together give her work authenticity.

Araki has taken thousands of sexually explicit images, publishing over 200 books.

Larry Clark was also part of the genre of photography as representation of sexually free society.

Fashion photography led to a spin-offs in art photography, notably Jurgen Teller's work, such as his images of go-see models.

Casual photography became vogue in 1990s with work such as Richard Billingham's photographic record of his chaotic and dysfunctional home life.

Other photographers have focussed on sequential family life, such as Annelies Strba, Ruth Erdt, and Elinor Carucci. Tina Barney and Larry Sultan have taken images of their rather better off families, Sultan with a mixture of posed and casual observations.

Like Tina Barney, Mitch Epstein took images of family life that "blend..photographically distant perspective with a subject that is intimately known." This is probably the key to successful images of family in an artistic sense: to use the knowledge the photographer has of his or her subjects to portray their characteristics, yet appear objective.