Depictions of Domestic Space
What defines domestic space, who fills up this space, and how do individuals operate within this paradigm—these are the main concerns underlying this body of work. I have always been compelled to document the people around me since I started photographing early on in my career. As my work progressed, my way of photographing the people in my life changed radically. Whereas early on my subjects were a template for my portraiture, I found that making them participants in the process resulted in a much more complicated interpretation. I wanted to photograph scenes, domestic scenes that played out my questions about the ideas of domestic partnership and the seemingly endless ways to express the futility of contemporary relationships. Multiple subjects came into play because of significant others, head and shoulders shots became full body profiles, and the space surrounding the subjects became just as vital as the people inhabiting them. Color fuels the strange and arbitrary ways in which all the different homes become similar and all the people of this generation seem to have similar palates creating this vintage allure to their modern dwellings. Each staging is my own and with every picture I take, I ask the questions: how do you do this? why do you do this? what is the underlying tension? Ultimately, the viewer has to confront their own idea of the domestic to come up with answers.
Who Are We?
...we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.
I said that they shouldn't be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere.
Towards the end of Donald Barthelme's Story "The School," the narrator, an elementary schoolteacher whose class has experienced an inordinate amount of death (everything from trees they've planted to pet snakes to fellow classmates) demand, in comically adult, metaphysical language, that their teacher provide some comforting answers, and, as the above quote suggests, he lamely suggests that they shouldn't be frightened, though he is often frightened.
This kind of duplicity is everywhere in contemporary America. As a country, we face death and decline on a grand, though for most of us abstract, scale. Fear mingles with double speak, and, in a profoundly anti-modernist turn, we love and celebrate our fear by turning away from the future, turning instead to the optimism of an America we experience in old movies, old objects and old clothes.
Ann Ploeger's photographs are, in this sense, deeply contemporary. They incorporate highly artificial elements of 19th Century portraiture. Their subjects, for the most part photographed in their homes and apartments, seem like actors on sets, surrounded by props which include their spouses, pets, cocktail glasses, mixing bowls, rotten bananas and garden hoses.
These objects and people, with their ironically bright and exceedingly shiny antiqueness, are treated as models for exploring Ploeger's own distanced interest in the domestic. How is it, she asks, do people do this? A couple posed on the side of a bathtub, with bodies wrapped in towels, look balefully at the camera. Is this what you want us to do? they seem to ask, one holding shaving cream, the other a razor. They aren't uncomfortable, don't look like they've been caught unaware. This isn't intimacy, because the pair are completely focused on the camera, and not on one another.
A private, emotional fear is at the center of Ploeger's project. A fear amplified by the photographer's insistence on iciness. The objects, in their high contrast and detail, and the people, with their consistently frank and flattened expressions, are merely elements in the photographs, parts of the set. This flatness makes these people intelligible to the artist. No pretense toward empathy, naturalism or effusion that isn't implicit in the objects and people themselves is bothered with.
Their courage is to maintain curiosity without succumbing to the need for an "assertion of value." Domestic bliss, as a value, is a cipher, and the emotions that such bliss entails are hot colors and flat expressions. Essentials, colors and shapes, with some people.
Statement by Jared Stanley
Calendar
This series came out of the desire to have fun with portraits while utilizing my own environment for the set-ups. I wanted these portraits to be playful pop art: bright, in-your-face, square format, head and shoulder shots. A "Calendar" concept would set the stage for 12 images, and photographing people based on their birthday month would provide the characters.
In order for every image to reflect both the month and the individual posing, each photo was planned out down to the last detail of backdrops, props, and clothing. The person posing knew little about their scenario until the time of the shoot. They did know that their birthday would be the title of each piece.
The photographs in this series are pop birthday portraits--they celebrate each month and celebrate the people who celebrate them most.
Ann Ploeger