Intimacies

Je t'aime in the shadows, Berkeley, California, October 2007.

In the age of the video scandal, where privately recorded intimacies become lurid public spectacle, it takes art to restore context to the intimate image.

Photographers have used the private image, both erotic and familial, to mine their personal and sexual relationships for meaning. Noboyushi Araki has relentlessly photographed every intimate sexual detail of his life and his many lovers, and the seamy underside of Tokyo's underground sex and bondage culture. His themes of sex, life and death challenge social taboos with their use of the visual language of fetishistic pornography. German fashion photographer Juergen Teller, a friend of Araki's, is also a visual diarist, turning to his wife, child and (very often) naked self to create images that are as sexually frank as they are funny. Nan Goldin, recipient of the 2007 Hasselblad Genius Award, has been called the Robert Frank of the 1980s for her depiction of the attitudes and sexual mores of her generation. In Ballad of Sexual Dependency, she chronicled her personal and sexual relationships with her circle of friends and lovers in the age of AIDS, a groundbreaking work that broke social taboos. Donna Ferrato's Love & Lust is equally provocative. Ostensibly about the sub-culture of sex clubs, it is equally about Ferrato's quest to explore the limits of her own sexuality.

In Living with His Camera, Jane Gallop writes about what it's like to live under the constant gaze of the camera of Dick Blau, an art photographer that she has been living with for more than twenty years and the father of her children. Blau's ever-present camera recorded every nuance of their family life, private, eventful and mundane: "The Leica is a camera for bed and breakfast, pajamas and toast," Gallop observes wryly. "As long as I've known Dick, there's been a Leica around." For Gallop, the cover photo of her sweeping the floor naked, observed by but oblivious to Gallop's camera, is both symbol and parody of the "stock representations of domestic life . . . both serious and a joke."

Above all, the intimate photograph can reveal the threads of love, affection and complexity that bind family members, spouses and lovers, as seen most beautifully in the work of Israeli photographer Elinor Carucci. Winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographers in 2001, Carucci started photographing her family at the age of 15. In her portfolio, Closer, she assembles portraits of herself and her family that are remarkable not only for their visceral sensuality, but for the unblinking trust she elicits from every member of her family. Carucci's lens literally zooms into the pores of her family's flesh. In a series of macro portraits so close they resemble abstractions, she photographs marks and creases on skin left by pillows, bedsheets or zippers; stitches on her husband's wounded finger; nipple hair being plucked by tweezers; her mother's eye, held wide-open by a Revlon eyelash curler that resembles the torture device in A Clockwork Orange. Together, the individual photographs create a group portrait of a very specific, idiosyncratic family unlike any other, rendered with knowingness and care. "I can't show intimacy in any general way, if there is such a thing as general intimacy," Carucci says. "I can only say something universal about intimacy through actual intimacy. Mine. The actual relationships I have with specific people. With these people that I love."




Noboyushi Araki, From Tokyo Lucky Hole.
Juergen Teller, From Do You Know What I Mean.
Nan Goldin, Couple in bed, Chicago, 1977.
Donna Ferrato, Worshiping Marlena, Lifestyles, Palm Sptings, 1996.
Elinor Carucci, Eran and I, 1998.
Elinor Carucci, My father and I, 1999.
Elinor Carucci, My mother and I, 2000.
Elinor Carucci, Eran and I, 1999.
Elinor Carucci, Wedding rings, 1999.
Elinor Carucci, Mother is worried, 1996.
Elinor Carucci, My mother's back, 1996.
Elinor Carucci, Mom hugs dad, 1994.
Elinor Carucci, Eran almost touches me, 1999.

All in the family

Sleeping in, Rockridge, December 2008.



We call them "Kodak moments," those milestones in family life that demand to be recorded in pictures. The slogan is also a tribute to George Eastman, the man whose invention of the Kodak camera in 1888 brought photography out of the professional studio and into the eager hands of the public-at-large. Nowadays, a person simply has to reach for a cell phone to snap a picture. For better or worse, we are all photographers now, and nowhere will we find more trusting and accessible subjects than our own families.

Many photographers have found muses for their art within their own families; some of them in their wives and lovers. To name just a few: Eleanor to Harry Callahan, Georgia O'Keefe to Alfred Stieglitz, Charis to Edward Weston, Lella to Édouard Boubat. A beautiful woman named Yoko was the young bride and muse of Noboyushi Araki, Japan's most celebrated and prolific photographer. In his photo diary Sentimental Journey, the earliest of more than 300 books, Araki documented the intimate details of his honeymoon with Yoko, a journey that took a tragic turn when Yoko became gravely ill and died. This tragedy, the sexually charged journey into death, will remain with Araki for always and will be recurring themes in his work.


VIDEO: Araki on "Sentimental Journey"

The close ties that bind family members translate with ease into playful depictions of family life. Children and babies naturally play prominent roles in pictures just as they do in daily life. In John Willis' almost abstract portrait, we know his baby is a boy. Nicholas Devore's portrait of Niki, a hilarious meditation on genetics, is one of my favorite pictures of all time. The symbol of home casts a long shadow over Abelardo Morell's sleeping children. The daughters of Harry Gruyaert prove that they are truly a photographer's spawn as they carry on without a trace of self-consciousness, oblivious to dad's ever present camera. Silvan Lewin's classic family group portrait tips its hat to Diego Velasquez' painting, Las Meninas. In Anne Testut's beautifully choreographed bedroom tableau, even the family dog has entered the act.

The concept of family is so powerful that even though it is devoid of people, a still life of dirty plates and a half-empty casserole of fish stew (Mannfred Willman) suggests the boisterous presence of a family feasting.

Aging and mortality are equally common themes in family photographs. Sylvia Plachy's grandparents are captured in a bubbly, childlike moment, but many famous photographers have documented their loved ones in decline. In "The Machine," fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti photographed his brother's struggle with a blood ailment that ultimately claimed his young life. Annie Leibovitz took an intimate and unflinching look at her partner, writer Susan Sontag, as she battled cancer, a fight that she ultimately lost in 2004. After the Bath is part of a series of photographs by Jill Lynworth chronicling the last six months of her brother's life with cancer and its effects on her family.

Sometimes photographs are portents. In 1984 Doug DuBois took a picture of his father in the train station; less than a year later his father "walked between two cars of the moving train and was found six hours later lying between the east and westbound tracks."

Finally, death itself. In "Death of my Father," photojournalist Peter Martens takes a decidedly detached look at the lifeless body of his father as he lays at the foot of the stairwell.













Silvan Lewin, Portrait, 1993.
Anne Testut, Le Lit (The Bed), 1985.
Abelardo Morell, Laura and Brady in the shadow of our house, 1994.
Nicholas Devore III, Where Niki Got his Red Hair, 1986.
Harry Gruyaert, Saskia and Marieke, Malaucene, 1999.
Noboyushi Araki, From Sentimental Journey, 1971.
Manfred Willmann, Fish Soup, 1981.
John Willis, Mother and Child= 1, 1985.
Sylvia Plachy, Grandma and Grandpa, 1979.
Peter Martens, Death of my Father, 1986.
Jill Lynnworth, After the Bath, 1987.
Doug DuBois, My Father, Train Station, 1984.