The Photographer’s Wife: Seeing and Staging

What can the camera capture? How can you take a picture of what is gone? Easier than you can capture what is there, I’m afraid.

For what is there is already always disappearing. Or rather, the camera captures the instant between an image and its memory, between a moment and memento mori. In Laura Heyman’s photos, the photograph is interested in exactly this interchange between what appears both inside and outside the frame, what happens before our eyes and behind them.

The story we tell ourselves varies and is as much about the viewer as the picture. Indeed, Heyman seems to relish the tension between viewer and picture; what’s more, her recent work, The Photographer’s Wife, puts that tension front and center. The fiction of the piece—that we are capturing not the work of a photographer, but the wife of the photographer and that the pieces are accidental, off-hand, startled—both reifies and rejects the stereotypes of women in the art world. These photographs do not capture starlets, or Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills, though they invoke these recent photographic histories, whether of tabloid or museum, while also critiquing a larger art history where the woman is muse or odalisque, inspiration or translation.

Here, the “wife” of the title becomes less a role than a revelation. In fact, I first viewed the series without knowing its title, and constructed my own narrative, one of alienation between the subject and the seer, and of displacement, which is made more profound by knowing the title. The woman in the photos—who I happen to know is Heyman herself (though not playing herself)—seems to be caught in in-between places. Hotels, out of the bath, train stations: we glimpse the wife, or do we follow her, across what feels like a city where either the viewer or the camera does not belong. The photos feel remarkably private, which contributes to their voyeuristic quality, and to the fact (and fiction) that they are not being seen or constructed, but lived—that they are not snapshots, stolen moments, but parts of a story. In the lens of Heyman, we feel less the voyeur’s stare than the stranger’s glance—or, better yet, the gaze of the husband to whom the wife is both known and mysterious.

The title uneases us. Perhaps we aren’t just a neutral observer after all, but the spouse who has taken the very picture we see? The title too reminds me of the parable of Lot’s Wife, who is told not to look back at the burning city or she would turn to ash. Unnamed, she of course looks; uneased, we of course look and are challenged by the photograph’s gaze, by the subject’s ashen hair. The photographs then tell two stories—that of the subject and that of the subjective point of view that sees her. They feel both more posed than a film still and more alive than recent generations of photographers. Like our American culture, The Photographer’s Wife is interested in staging and seeing—with a freshness that is Heyman’s own.