Review from: Exhibition at Myhren Gallery; Through November 15, 2009

At the Myhren Gallery: a striking new lens on family life
By Kyle MacMillan

When Henri Cartier- Bresson ventured onto the streets of Paris or Dorothea Lange toured the Depression-ravaged South, they were in search of reality as they found it — in the moment and largely unfiltered.

Some of today's photographers seek to portray the world around them, as well, but they use more roundabout methods, creating images that are staged, constructed or manipulated but equally as real in their way.

Works by three such photographers — Janet Delaney, Todd Hido and Cecil McDonald Jr. — are on view in "The Family Stage," an exhibition running through Nov. 15 in the University of Denver's Myhren Gallery.

Offering perspectives on domestic life that are strikingly different in style and point of view, these sets of images are to varying degrees enigmatic, emotionally contained and, in the case of Hido's reminiscences, downright grim.

As varied as they might be in their approaches, these photographers share an intense interest in narrative, though what stories they are trying to tell in these images — individually or as a group — often remain elusive and incomplete.

In a closed-in series tellingly titled "Housebound," Delaney turns to her camera during a tough time in her life when her second child was just born and her father was increasingly struggling with dementia.

Although there are a few straight-on portraits, the Berkeley, Calif., photographer offers mostly hints and glimpses of her domestic world. She relishes juxtapositions, such as a cropped image of a girl from the thighs down paired with another of a translucent window shade overlaying a lace curtain.

Running through this series are frequent, often voluptuous close-ups of food, such as a strangely unsettling look at a dripping pomegranate. They evoke certain feelings and suggest a kind of iconography but never convey any clear meanings.

Along with smile-inducing images, such as soap suds gently engulfing a pair of faucets, is a tight-in view of a Post-it note with the chilling words, "Mama come back," giving the whole set of photographs a darker emotional cast.

It also raises questions about what is stage-managed and what is serendipity in these images. Did Delaney just stumble across this note? Or did she create it to fill out the narrative and enhance the dramatic impact of this series?

There is no doubt that McDonald's images, with their saturated colors and strategic lighting, are staged, because that process is the very essence of the Chicago photographer's series, "Domestic Observations and Occurrences."

At first glance, these scenes appear as fly-on-the-wall snatches of everyday life — a father and daughter arguing in the car or a daughter energetically dancing while her mother prepares dinner in the adjacent kitchen.

But these are actually carefully constructed tableaux, re-creating such ordinary moments, with McDonald using himself and his family as essentially actors. In this way, the photographer can distance himself and take a more analytical look at his subject matter.

Hido, of Oakland, Calif., best known for his ruminative nocturnal images of houses, is represented here by a very different body of work that transforms the sketchy, seemingly amateurish look of snapshots into a desired, expressive aesthetic.

In a series titled "Ohio," Hido combines a group of family photos his father shot in the 1970s with ones that he took in 2008 using the same Instamatic camera — kind of re-created memories that reflect on and extend the earlier chronicle.

Together, these melancholic, often disturbing images tell a story of a difficult childhood with which it appears Hido is still trying to come to terms.

Here and on the other family stages, reality is in the eye and mind of the photographer.

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Review from: Exhibition at Second Street Gallery; Through October 27, 2007

Cecil McDonald, Jr.: "Domestic Scenes, Imaginary Play"
By Erika Howsare


In Cecil McDonald's photographs, the opposite of documentary is ambiguity. The wall text at his Second Street show describes his project as an alternative to the common representation of African-American families in gritty, chaotic documentary photos; instead, McDonald carefully stages his images, using himself and his wife and daughters as actors in imaginary dramas. What's impressive is that, although every detail of these scenes is deliberately chosen, the photos are still steeped in uncertainty. McDonald's hand, though much in evidence, is not a heavy one.

Perhaps that's because he allows his cast members to improvise somewhat within given parameters. Take "Afternoon Picnic," in which the two girls and their picnic blanket are a fragile island of domestic order against a backdrop of anonymous industry (grain elevators, a freight train and untended grass). The image is already powerful in a design sense, but what makes it emotionally arresting are the girls' expressions—fleeting and unreadable, perhaps registering discomfort. The open questions those faces raise would have been impossible to plan.

The possibility of really knowing this family through these photos is tantalizing, but just out of reach. If the human interactions are allowed to be serendipitous, the physical surroundings that, in documentary work, might illuminate them instead seem as orchestrated—and thus as artificial—as theater sets. "Why Scales Matter?" is shot in a living room, with McDonald and one daughter at an upright piano. She lies, maybe sullenly, on the piano bench; her father's face is neutral; her sister is coming through the doorway. Telling details are here—sheet music, family photos on the piano—but there is a sense that even the rumpled rugs were placed just so, and that other objects may have been removed.

Though the lighting is clear and crisp, the situation is hard to grasp. And though the actual family members are present, their private life is hidden. These are productive tensions, artful rather than confused. One might equally praise McDonald's narrative imagination and rich, muscular sense of color; but in the end, it's the question of what it means to stage one's own home life that drives these intriguing works.

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