Photographer as participant observer: Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham, and Nobuyoshi Araki
Item
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Title
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Photographer as participant observer: Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham, and Nobuyoshi Araki
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:edeef856ac1f:11867
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identifier
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12194
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Creator
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Yi, Hyewon,
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Contributor
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Anna Chave
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art history | Film studies | Cultural anthropology | Gonzo Journalism | Insider Photographers | Participant Observation | Participant Observer Photography | Quasi documentary photography | Shock as tactic
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the tactics employed by four art photographers---Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham, and Nobuyoshi Araki---whose approach is analogous to that of the so-called Gonzo journalists who notoriously blurred the line between author and subject. Operating from deeply insider positions, they brought topics of excess to the fore, often shocking viewers with the apparent lack of moral judgment or rationality on offer in their highly personal, autobiographical works.;My study provides, by way of background, a genealogy of participant observation approaches in anthropology and journalism. It then traces how the anthropologists' approach to ethnographic research on exotic others came to be applied to domestic subjects in the West during the 1970s. The 1960s and 70s saw explicitly subjective reporting techniques flourish in journalism; and I argue that participant observer photography was born of this cultural climate. Britain's strong documentary photography tradition saw a shift toward the subjective and the individual during the 1970s and 80s, while more personalized forms of photography quickly arose in Japan in the early 1970s. Thus, the shift toward a subjectivized or autobiographical photography can be seen as a trans-cultural and trans-national phenomenon.;The chapters devoted to the principal artist-subjects of this dissertation examine their respective social and cultural contexts, and identify their particular modes of practice. Larry Clark's initial, insider position gave way to what I term a voyeuristic position, especially in films that depict with gritty realism the darker side of juvenile delinquency. Nan Goldin remained within her intimate circle to make works in what I call an integrated mode, an approach that reflected the culture of 1980s bohemian life in New York City. Following both the subjective documentary tradition in Great Britain and its family photography tradition, Richard Billingham's photobook, Ray's a Laugh, and video, Fishtank, were created by a detached observer whose approach I regard as a dissociated mode. As for Nobuyoshi Araki, he assumed a reflexive and performative mode, particularly in pornographic images that blurred factual recording with staged elements.;The vaunted authenticity of participant observation photography falls prey to the paradox that once an artist achieves recognition, her or his subjects become more aware that they are exchanging privacy for exposure. Insider participant observation photography has flourished into a second generation of artists who face the challenges of their subjects' awareness of the presence of the camera and the commercialization of the phenomenon, as exemplified by the emergence of so-called heroin chic in 1990's fashion photography.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Art History
