Chelsea summer

What can photography tell us about identity? Can photographers still attempt to document the “real” world? Why do blue chip Chelsea galleries stay open all summer? This past August, I went to investigate these “important” questions at a group exhibition of photo-based work by Tracey Moffatt, Uta Barth, Inez van Lamsweerde, and Rineke Djikstra at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. These are all currently “hot” names on the international art circuit, seen as successors to such new “masters” as Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Matthew Barney.

Figure 1.

Tracey Moffatt, “Useless, 1974,” 1994, from the series Scarred for Life. Offset print, set of 9, edition of 50, 80cm x 60cm. Photo: Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Paddington.

Figure 2.

Rineke Dijkstra, Tecla, Amsterdam, die Niederlanden, 16 May 1994. Photograph, 60¼″ x 50¾″. Photo: Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Figure 3.

Inez van Lamsweerde, Markus, 1996. C-print on plexiglass, 39⅜″ x 29½″. Photo: Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

The most complex and ambitious work in the summer show was by the Australian photographer and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt, also the subject of a major fall exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Scarred for Life, her series of nine offset lithographs at Matthew Marks, juxtaposes grainy images of children or adolescents with brief dated and captioned narratives. They all depict physical or verbal abuse. Children are told they aren’t any good. A listless girl washes a car. The caption reads, “Her father’s nickname for her was useless.” In “Job Hunt, 1976,” a boy leans against a brick wall: “After three weeks he still couldn’t find a job. His mother said to him ‘maybe you’re not good enough.’”

The uninitiated viewer is lured into wondering where Moffatt finds her images. Could they come from some family photo album? From a magazine? What magazine would possibly publish such pictures? Who takes photos at moments like these? The not surprising answer is that Moffatt, like Cindy Sherman and her many disciples, takes pictures of staged tableaux. I assume a critique of photography’s objectivity is implicit in this strategy of constructing reality rather than “documenting” it.

The version of photo authoritarianism Moffatt takes aim at is the spreads she grew up looking at in magazines like Life. Life documented “history.” But it didn’t document the life Moffatt knew, middle class life in suburban Australia. It didn’t show these very ordinary and crucial moments of psychic and physical degradation. Moffatt wants to expose the syntactical limitations of a familiar genre. At the same time, she wants to give us a pseudo-documentary of the troubling moments which don’t, or can’t, get recorded. It is interesting that we are given very few visual clues to locate these mini-dramas temporally. The image supposedly from 1976 might as well be from 1965 or 1956. Maybe, when it comes to domestic trauma, 1956 isn’t all that different from 1976. Childhood misery is timeless. The grainy quality of the images further suggests that these “scarring” moments have been reproduced so many times that it doesn’t really matter, or one can’t really say, where or when they originated.

Moffatt is more successful in pointing out the limitations of photo-documentation than in evoking empathy for her protagonists. It’s hard to know how to feel about these kids. Their stories are obviously depressing, but over time they begin to seem depressingly obvious. This is a consequence of Moffatt’s success in imitating magazine writing. “She glimpsed her father beating the girl from down the street. That day he died of a heart attack.” Well, life is tough. It’s difficult to mimic a stale media formula and evoke sympathy. A portrayal of pain which isn’t believable risks being boring or...