https://embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Emily White – Untitled (2016)

My life is so weird sometimes and the truth is I don’t even really think about it. It’s sort of like stepping onto a scale to check your weight everyday. If you do it–which I don’t recommend–then any weight loss or gain is gradual. You don’t think you’re making any progress, even though (over time) you are. (Similarly, when someone sees you in person and you haven’t seen them in a while and they’re like, gurl, you’re hair has grown so long! And you’re like, oh yeah, I guess it has… I see it every day so I lose track.)

(Bear with me, I’m taking the scenic route back to the above image.)

In the weird thing that is my big gay life I’m actually internet friends with my favorite photographer. Mostly she shares pictures of her adorbs daughter, we kvetch about sexist men/how much bullshit this patriarchal society is, etc. She’ll remind me that I still need to see that Diane Arbus documentary she’s been recommending to me for months. I make sure she doesn’t miss new Björk videos when they drop–we both are perpetually stumped on the question of whether we want to be Björk or be with her…

Anyway, I showed her Emily White’s work and overall she was underwhelmed/dismissive. We’re usually so in sync–it was strange to have such differing perspectives.

One of the things I’ve always been adept at is explaining why I appreciate something. It’s rare that I’m ever going to say: I don’t know why, I just love it. I can usually give you half a dozen extremely concrete reasons even if you put me on the spot about it.

With White–for example: there’s a sense of narrativity. A bit like Lauren Withrow–whose aesthetic I dig but the impetus in her work is always so unequivocally narrative driven that I often fell that the work is more aspirational than accomplished. Like it’s open ended. Withrow cultivates a young, haute and rebellious cast of characters because she’s hoping that the people she’s making her work for will relate and sort of super impose their experience and expectations upon the characters in an effort to relate to what they are seeing.

It’s a narrative tact. But is it a good one? I’m decidedly in the detractor camp. I have this idea that every story contains a moment where if that moment is photographed you can even though you only see a fraction of a second in time you can extend a cinematic timeline in your mind that reaches forward and backward. You can tell how you arrived here and discern a bit of what is going to happen next. It’s a bit like Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment–which I’m also a detractor from: it’s all too fatalistic for me. I prefer the latitude for various interpretations in Vermeer’s decisive moments that use universal tropes and familiar experiential anchor points to suggest a tonally cohesive narrative arc with multiple potential readings.

Withrow’s characters are effectively cardboard cutouts for what she feels are her audiences projections. Therefore it’s only narrative post-active engagement by the viewer. Whereas Vermeer is narrative to start.

Back to White: I find her work audacious because whether it intends to or not it presents a critique of both Withrow and Vermeer’s implementation. Intentional ambiguity and a range of universal and certain interpretations are replaced with uncertainty. (And I think there’s something that could be written on how she’s effectively deconstructing the Lynchian conflation of the surreal and the oneironautlical as interchangeable–they aren’t and shouldn’t be but Lynch has made a spectacular career out of playing fast and loose with the blurring of those boundaries.)

In her work, we know how we got up to the point in time we are asked to bear witness to. How? Well, if you’ve followed Deviant Art and Flickr famous young women photographers–the angst, alienation and efforts to exercise individual autonomy all resound. But what makes the work effect is that it avoids the ubiquitous exhibitionism for something that reminds me of something I read recently in a novel titled Black Mad Wheel (the second novel from Josh Malerman who wrote the incredible Bird Box–which I highly recommend; BMW, is largely and unfortunately execrable.)

Some cultures believe that when you take a photo, you’re saying this period, this phase, is over with, [s]o if you enjoy your life as it is, mourn.. Because now it will be as it was.

There’s this weird way that White’s images are cut off from the history which clearly informs their construction. And although there is not a sense within the image of anything sinister, the prevailing feeling of uncertainty with regards to where things go from here contribute both a beauty and terror to the bodies she trains her lens upon.

White’s work is–I’ll concede to my friend–not yet fully formed. And it does suffer from nearly a decade of angsty undergrad grrrl art. But if you can look past that, there is something ridiculous precocious in her work. Also, it’s nuttier than squirrel shit and probably has more to do with her going to a WASPy liberal arts college, but I swear to fucking Christ that I’ve been to several of the locations she’s uses in her more recent work. I know I haven’t but the sense of familiarity is utterly unnerving–and I like it very much, that feeling…