Public vs. Private

Abstract

Society for Photographic Education National Conference San Francisco March 22-25, 2012 Photography superstar Sally Mann opened the forty-ninth annual Society for Photographic Education (SPE) conference in San Francisco by reading portions of what she described as her gothic, southern memoir If Memory Serves, which she originally presented as a Massey lecture at Harvard University in 2011. Her essay, read in the dark and only scantily punctuated with black-and-white snapshots of people from her childhood, placed her personal experience in the context of her upbringing in the American South, with its racial horrors and lack of ecological morality. final section of her essay moved into a slideshow of her most recent body of work, The Black Man, which consists of sepia-toned portraits of the titular subjects' bodies and body parts, which Mann accompanied by a reading from Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric. In discussing this new work, Mann acknowledged the inherent exploitation of portraiture, and explained that this new body of work would speak to such problematics in its aesthetic qualities and content. She defended this new project, speaking of the benediction of creating a good picture and maintaining that these close-up, segmented bodies of black men are a voyeuristic inventory of the body parts. She praised her subjects' willingness to participate fully in this intimate and private act, claiming it 41. worth the risk of making [themselves] so vulnerable. Mann's attention to the private as public, while sticky in its essentializing of complicated issues of historical racism and her exhibition of an arguably dominant gaze, did in some perhaps nearly coincidental way set the stage for the conference theme of Intimacy and Voyeurism: Public/Private Divide in Photography. As Mann harkened back to a time of hushed talk and closed-door conversations, modern-day photographers face a world with no secrets, where the personal and private is so often made public--both by choice and wholly involuntarily. theme of the conference was loosely followed with a handful of sessions that ostensibly addressed this issue--not surprisingly often under the guise of portraiture. Arno Rafael Minkkinen presented on the issue of public/private in portrait photography. Beginning with the work of Finnish photographer Pekka Turunen, Minkkinen explored the people of Finland through depictions of them in the various rooms of their homes, on their farms, and posing with their livestock, cars, and family members. He shared Margaret M. de Lange's book project Surrounded By No One (2011), which uses spontaneity and immediacy, to dispel boundaries. In an artist's presentation, Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin discussed the challenges of photographing peasant villagers in Transylvania, which resulted in her book Color of Hay: Peasants of Maramures (2010). Laraia focused on the awkwardness of being an outsider capturing intimate private moments such as funerals, even though she had the blessing of her subjects. Amanda Herman shared her work interviewing families who were exiled from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She interviewed in depth all the members of one family, resulting in the film Lost Island (2007). When questioned by an audience member about how she negotiates the potential for retraumatization, Herman shared that the projects addressed these issues from an uncommon angle and that although she did worry about the possibility of retraumatization, her subjects seemed comfortable with their own process and sharing it with her in this creative manner. As part of the panel discussion Where Are We Now?: Google Maps, GPS, and GeoTags in the Landscape, Nathan Jurgenson called for an augmented art, arguing that online and offline lives should not be considered so disparate; instead we should honor a third space. In terms of public/private he argued that we have developed a vision whereby we are fully aware of the documentary possibilities of our day-to-day experience. …