Submitted by Jean Dykstra on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 11:46am
Nan Goldin, The Nap, Paris, 2010
Familiarity is a funny thing: It helps you understand things faster, but it also discourages you from paying attention because you think you know it all already. Take, for example, Nan Goldin’s unusual show Scopophilia, on view at Matthew Marks through December 23. Goldin’s name is synonymous with images depicting a true-life cast of characters from the arty fringes of society—the raw and the cooked. But with Scopophilia, she offers a surprising recontextualization of her work. Goldin, a longtime New Yorker who has been a Parisian since 2000, roamed the Louvre in its off hours and soaked up an entirely new (or, rather, old) milieu and, as she has throughout her career, she interpreted the figures around her with her camera. In the 25-minute slideshow that is Scopophilia—the title refers to the love of looking—she juxtaposes her photos of venerable Louvre paintings and sculptures with images plucked from her archives. It’s a mashup that has justifiably captured the imagination of the photoblogosphere. The New Yorker’s Photo Booth blog, a thoughtful source of top-flight photography both in and beyond the magazine’s pages, featured 10 images from Scopophilia, and the Web site American Suburb X posted “Bohemian Ballads,” an essay exploring Goldin’s groundbreaking series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. (Speaking of American Suburb X, it’s a site well worth bookmarking. Compiled by photographer Doug Rickard, it teems with so many wonderful archival essays, interviews, and galleries that paying it regular visits should be tantamount to earning a degree in photography.)
In the case of the tumblr site Dear Photograph and a new ad campaign by Chevy, familiarity is a murkier subject. Dear Photograph made a name for itself by inviting people to submit a photo that combines an old picture of sentimental importance held up in front of that same location today, along with a caption explaining the story of the photo. There’s no Photoshop involved; the old photo is simply held up by hand, with the person’s fingers just visible in the frame. It’s a concept that is as simple as it is powerful, as Dear Photograph’s 18,000-plus followers would surely attest. And the ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners must think so too because—as Adweek’s blog Adfreak pointed out—their new ads for Chevy use that exact format: a hand holding up an old photo in front of a new one (except all of the images include a Chevrolet, of course). Is the campaign flattery, theft, free publicity, or some combination of all of the above? Or, more philosophically, is it proof that Dear Photograph has demonstrated something lovers of photography have always known: that a photograph can excavate our emotions surrounding the familiar in a way that no other medium can?
By Kristina Feliciano
