John Higgins
Review of the week
Two slightly absurd questions: have you ever had your photo taken? Have you ever photographed someone else? Very likely, your answer is yes: at weddings, on holiday or just with the family; as a child, as a lover, as a friend.
Like most successful industries, amateur photography is based on an obscure combination of needs and desires so perfectly cultured as to appear normal. It’s an industry worth billions, and is, in the main, carefully segregated from questions of artistic value or aesthetic pleasure.
In her new exhibition, Family Affairs, Cape Town artist Terry Kurgan challenges the established boundaries between public image and private snapshot, between art and amateurism. The show is divided into three sections: the first, comprising just three ordinary framed photos from the family album, showing three generations of mothers and daughters; the second, seven very large blown-up shots – tinted sepia – of Kurgan’s own two children, Jonah and Jessie (who were the objects of her previous exhibition, Home Truths); and finally, just two grainy black and white images of the mother naked, one with each child.
The first section also includes an apparent e-mail exchange between Kurgan and her mother, though the style and clarity of the writing seems much more composed than the usual e-mail message.
”I’ve continued to regularly photograph the kids”, writes Kurgan, noting how her two children have come to inhabit and manipulate the codes and poses of family photography, attempting at all times to express the happiness demanded by the family album.
At the same time, Kurgan looks back at the photos of her own mother as a child in her grandmother’s arms, taken before the public horrors of the Holocaust, and writes about how ”Given what happened later, and the impact of all that trauma and dislocation, that image is impossible for me to look at and see anything other than absence and loss.”
Here, the difficulty of the gap between private and public image becomes fully apparent as only the writing can make the private association public, and verbally frame the photos in such a way as to urge the viewer to share her knowledge and feelings, and carry them across to a reading of the rest of the show.
At first glance, the children’s expressions are the focal points of the pictures in the second section: Jonah, very pensive and adult in the shower stall, then confident and full of brio before a cloth backdrop; Jessie, challenging and provocative in the garden, pensive and wistful in the shower stall.
But the awkwardly clasped fingers tell another story – that of the pose, the consciousness of being photographed, the weight and imposition of the photographer’s gaze and desire, the root of this family affair. And this comes through all the more strongly in the photos of the two posed, together, uncertainly, as king and queen; and both looking unhappy and discomposed in the final picture. At work throughout, a certain violence, perhaps the quintessential violence of photographic possession (what does ”to photograph” mean?), a violence of parental love and ownership, posing the question, just whose childhood is this?
Does it belong to the subjects or the objects of such photos? In the same way, the most aesthetically pleasing picture is also the most disturbing: Jessie as sweet angel. But the lighting, pose and costume strip her of her specific identity, and threaten to make her a commodity of the gaze, with surely deliberate echoes of Lewis Carroll’s posings of Alice Liddell.
”There I am”, writes Kurgan of the two photos which close the exhibit, ”looking horrified.” Both are untreated black and white, grainy, out of focus: we see the blur of the real and feel the resistance to posing, the now vulnerable naked body of the mother/photographer, first with Jonah, then with a grinning Jessie. Two kids getting their own back, as if in some gesture of revenge or reciprocity, each of the children in turn occupies the intrusive place of the photographer.
Have you ever had your photo taken? Have you ever photographed someone else? Terry Kurgan’s new work, interestingly, brings into focus just how strange that common verb ”to photograph” can be.
Terry Kurgan’s Family Affairs is on at the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, Cape Town, until October 16