Homelife (with children)
The personal is political. This philosophical point of view imbues daily domestic experience with meaning beyond the mundane. Domesticity may be experienced in private, but the implications of habitual behavior, interpersonal dynamics, and desires, reflect the influence of social conditioning. For over a decade, persistent documentation of the self and family—a labor of love—explored the multi-layered complexities, pleasures, and tensions of the relational and material aspects of ‘home.’
To see our life through the camera is to illuminate a difference between perceived awareness and material appearances. Because the camera sees broadly and objectively, in contrast to one’s field of attention, an exposure will often reveal surprises in both graphic forms and juxtapositions. Despite one’s sense of control over the image, unexpected and/or coincidental inferences are apt to imbue relations between family members according to how spacial dynamics, facial expressions, postures, the density and coincidental proximity of objects, affect purview of the gaze. And since the feelings and intentions of subjects are invisible, conjecture and memory condition how one understands a picture.
When employing the family as the documentary subject the result can be more understanding and intimacy among family members, as well as frustration, resistance and humor.
At left: Saturday in girls’ room, Charlotte, 1989.