FaceOn examines and recontextualises new and existing photographic and lens – based art works which question the genre of documentary photography. The artists selected for this exhibition, Jennifer Bornstein, Roderick Buchanan, Philip Lorca-diCorcia, Adam Chodzko, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Alfredo Jaar all create images which involve a social exchange between themselves as ‘artist’ and their documented, human subject. The images are centred on the sometimes unequal exchange between representer and represented, and a willing human participant as a site for photography.
The idea of an exchange/interaction is crucial to an understanding of documentary and realist modes of art making. The exhibiting artists are aware of this problematic and try to redress it through various ways, giving visibility to others, (often the displaced or dispossessed) , and insisting on us, the viewer, looking into the eyes and faces of others.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles explores this theme for example through the work, ‘Touch Sanitation: Handshake Ritual’, photographing herself shaking hands with 8,500 sanitation workers in New York. The images recall politicians ‘flesh-pressing’ rituals. Philip Lorca DiCorcia’s portraits of male prostitutes, drifters and drug addicts, all taken in a glowing early evening light along Santa Monica Boulevard, are titled with the persons details and fee: ‘ Brent Booth: 21 Years Old, Des Moines, Iowa: $30’. Combining single screen video and installation works, staged colour photographic tableaux, performance documentation film and photographs, the images have the initial appearance of family portraiture. In every case the position and relationship of the photographer is questioned.
Drawn from images produced in the 90’s, FaceOn is rooted in realist and documentary problematics but concerned with the difficulties of relaying the differing experiences of ordinary lived social realities of both the artist and their subjects.