By Andrea Karnes, chief curator, and Clare Milliken, assistant curator
Home can refer to a town or a dwelling, but also an individual, a community, or a state of being. Often tied to family, home can evoke comfort, familiarity, safety, and love, but also fear, loss, loneliness, and regret. The domestic sphere is ambiguous: sometimes empowering and sometimes confining, a site of peace as well as conflict, a place of respite and of labor, a safe haven and a boundary to escape.
The artists included in this exhibition examine conceptions of home in all their complexity. Created by photographers from diverse backgrounds and multiple generations, the still and moving images in Diaries of Home present multilayered visions of family and expand the definition of kinship. The artists lean into the apparently factual quality of photography and video, playing with and against social norms and cultural biases. Each artist utilizes and examines archetypal roles and stereotypes in their own fashion, raising questions about how notions of the self are formed. Taken together, their narratives—woven from strands of reality and autobiography as well as fantasy and fabrication—present a kind of multi-authored diary of perspectives on home.
The women and non-binary artists featured in the exhibition use a variety of photographic processes, ranging from printed images to slides and videos. Many use themselves and their close relations as center points to magnify social constructs and family dynamics. Customarily, domesticity and family have close ties to feminism and feminist art—especially in photography, where women artists have been among the strongest voices since the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, women as makers are at the center of this exhibition. Their works give shape to Diaries of Home, bringing dimension to psychological interiority, exploring the complexities of a rootedness that shapes who we are, and attending to the inconsequential and profound moments of daily routine—all aspects that compose a life’s journey.
The images in Diaries of Home depict many kinds of family units, both biological and constructed. Sally Mann’s three children are her subject matter in lush portraits that imply a spectrum of childhood from innocent reverie to a darker side. Nan Goldin portrays her lover and friends as a “chosen tribe,” as she calls them, while Laurie Simmons’s latest explorations incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) as she considers our beloved pets’ roles in making up a family. Each artist offers illustrative narratives that speak to viewers on several levels—intimate and personal, broad and societal. Their imagery elaborates on tales of love, desire, loss, home, and the intricacies of human relationships.
The vernacular of documentary photography can create an immediate sense of familiarity and understanding for viewers, building on the notion that such images document truth. This implied truthfulness has been elaborated on and challenged by writer, philosopher, and political activist Susan Sontag, among others. Sontag argues that photographs, even those that seem to depict an objective reality, reflect the decisions and biases of their makers, who crop, frame, and manipulate what is seen in any given photograph. The works in Diaries of Home subvert implied truthfulness, presenting each photographers’ inherent subjectivity. The narratives they capture lend a diaristic quality to the photographs regardless of how much truth or fantasy is woven in, creating a conceptual focal point that inspired the exhibition’s title and encourages viewers to engage with the imagery’s relationship to realness.
Learn more about the artists in Diaries of Home in the following pages.