Photographs from Doug DuBois’s All the Days and Nights, focusing on his family, first appeared in the 1991 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, in the company of work by William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and some 70 other artists. It was an important, widely discussed show, but it’s arguably still true that, as Alec Soth remarked in 2007,” DuBois has to be at the top of the list of under-appreciated American photographers.” So this mid-career survey, on view at Aperture through May 19, is a welcome immersion in the photographer’s work.
DuBois describes what he does as “creative nonfiction” rather than documentary, and there are hints of Jim Goldberg and Larry Sultan in the work. DuBois asked his family members to respond to his early pictures of them by writing directly on the prints, “a la Jim Goldberg.” But Sultan’s influence may be more strongly felt, in DuBois’s confident use of color and in his semi-staged, intentionally open-ended narratives. In All the Days and Nights, we see the members of his family age, cope with his father’s near-fatal accident after he fell from a commuter train, grow up, and grow apart. With graceful pacing, DuBois moves in close, to show the pain in his mother’s thousand-yard stare, and out again, so that a flotilla of toy dinosaurs suggest his nephew’s imagination.
Rather than photographing from inside the intimate circle of his subjects, DuBois became an outsider in My Last Day at Seventeen. As an adult, an American, and a visitor to the insular, working-class community of Cobh, Ireland, he was an interloper in every way. An artist-in-residence at the Sirius Art Center, he was eventually accepted by a group of teenagers, but the project coalesced for DuBois when he photographed a particular boy, Lenny. He captures the nuance of Lenny’s adolescent face, swathed in a white hood, with smoke from his cigarette floating across it like a wisp of cloud. Close-up portraits alternate with choreographed scenes like a dozen children climbing and playing in Russell Heights. DuBois captures the listlessness of teenagers as well as their fearlessness – they climb streetlights and throw their tattooed bodies into the water. But his pictures also foreshadow the responsibilities of adulthood closing in, memorializing a time of relative, and fleeting, innocence.
Best of 2016
Formed in 1963 by 11 photographers who recognized the necessity of “a forum to address the underrepresentation of African Americans in their field,” the Kamoinge Workshop gave its members a sense of solidarity and support in a period when black Americans were the frequent subject of mainstream media coverage but rarely its author.
Liliana Porter: “Humor is a Tool”
In her exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, Liliana Porter peoples her tableaus with a range of figurines, from Mickey Mouse and Mao to Che Guevara and Elvis, creating playful, subversive images along the way.
Tommy Kha's Synonyms for Self
Performative self-portraits, photographs of his mother, and the landscape of the south inform Kha's new book, Half, Full, Quarter.
Bill Hunt
“Photography, for me, is a life’s mission,” says collector, curator, teacher, writer, former dealer, onetime actor, and full-time storyteller Bill Hunt.
Isaac Julien's Pictures and Progress
Reinterpreting and expanding the conventions of film and photography, Isaac Julien examines the marred history of race relations in the U.S. through the life of Frederick Douglass.
Sheila Metzner: Looking Backward, Dreaming Forward
A Getty Museum exhibition showcases Sheila Metzner’s luscious, languorous floral and fashion studies.
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Multimedia Mythmaker
At the Brooklyn Museum, the inquisitive Cuban-born artist presents work in photography, assemblage, performance, and painting.
A Career-Spanning Survey of Uta Barth's Rigorous, Seductive Photographs
The German-born photographer’s precise work, on view at the Getty Center, explores what it’s like to see and perceive our surroundings.
Fazal Sheikh: Creating Common Ground
About 15 years ago, I came across Fazal Sheikh’s s...
Louise Lawler: Playing with Pictures
In 2002, the Museum of Modern Art closed its doors...
Sally Mann: Southern Discomfort
If there is one medium over which the photographer...
An-My Lê
Beginning March 14, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is presenting On Contested Terrain, the artist’s first major survey show, with nearly 125 images.