November 3 – 26, 2005
The images in the In Camera series are of photographic studios in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, and Vietnam. Old photo studios provide environments where the past, the present, the raditional and the contemporary collide and where painted backgrounds and props give clues into notions of class, taste and aspiration.
The series builds on premises of traditional documentary photography but mixed with painterly and cinematic (implied narrative) additions. The panorama camera is perfect for this work in the way it compacts the world, widens it like Cinemascope yet flattens it to be read like a page of literature.
The backdrops, dealing with representations of the natural and man-made world, are, in their fashion, idealized versions of both. The pastoral, always a subject of painting, is here utilized to both ground the sitter (posing, of course, indoors) in the great, though tamed, outdoors and to enhance his stature in the world at large. The indoor scenes harken back to painting too and strive to bolster, if not promote, the sitter’s social status. These juxtapositions—along with that of the mundane clutter surrounding the magical painted backdrops–are full of longing, hope, ambition and irony. The lushness of the Cibachrome prints emphasizes—and attempts to duplicate–the vibrancy and liveliness that the studio owners infuse into their own work.