Technicolor Life
October 2 – November 2, 2014
Stephen Mayes, Managing Director, VII Photo Agency, Brooklyn, NY
Documentary photographers choose a particular area of human experience with which to frame their work. For some it’s the street, while for others it’s the family, social injustice, or a particular conflict. Bill McCullough is unusual in exploring a ritual activity that is often overlooked or seen as photographically banal. In the process he reveals that wedding photography can be a serious genre of documentary practice. McCullough steps beyond his clients’ need for a formal record of their big day to study the wedding as a laboratory of human behavior.
McCullough’s artist statement says: “In the world of wedding photography, the obvious is front and center. However, I am not interested in the obvious. I am interested in abstractions and open narratives.” His parallel world is rich in layered narratives that explore the social theater framed by the wedding stage. The resulting tableaux are balletic, freezing chaotic motion as poised interactions rich in gesture and expression. The drama that was enacted on the wedding day is reenacted with wit and panache in McCullough’s carefully choreographed images that probe the seams of the stage-managed events and explore the subtext in this theater of manners. The players are indeed onstage, self-consciously on display in ritualistic dress and following a prescribed choreography, but McCullough finds a counterpoint between these controlled environments and practiced performances, and the individuality of the performers.
His statement goes on to say: “I embrace and use the camera as I once did the pedal steel guitar. It provides me an outlet to compose, perform, and record.” It’s a sort of intellectual synesthesia that converts his experience from sound to color, revealing a world that is at once random and structured, planned yet spontaneous, a world made coherent by McCullough’s wry but warm intensity.
We as viewers, sometimes participants and sometimes voyeurs, know enough of the tune to tap our feet and even sing along, taking pleasure in the solo breaks and engaging harmonies that emerge in these pictures. Dramatic statements, subtle anxieties, small embarrassments, and big pleasures feature in the set of new photographic framings and lights that recontextualize the action of the wedding and take it into a larger social context.
Bill McCullough is a true discovery, not only as a photographic talent but also as an exponent of serious documentary work in an area of photography that is overlooked and underestimated by photographers and critics in other fields.
