Canadian photographer Maude Arsenault began her career as a fashion photographer, staging shoots, setting up lights, making pictures of beautiful people in beautiful clothes. But her latest body of work, Resurfacing (published by Deadbeat Club, 2023), is all about the flaws. Wrinkles, tears, cracks, scratches, and stains prevail. Hair is tangled, sheets are creased, buildings are in dire need of repair. Life is unruly, messy, and lovely. Arsenault’s previous body of work, Entangled, was in part a reckoning with how her identity as an artist meshed, sometimes uneasily, with her identity as a woman and a mother. Resurfacing explores what it feels like to move through that stage of life into a new world in which familial relationships are changing and her sense of herself is shifting. That shift can feel as earth-shaking and sudden as a building caving in, revealing the beams and supports that are no longer necessary (as in an image of a partially collapsed – or razed – brick building), or as incremental as the crow’s feet and grey hair that weren’t there only a day before (in a close up of Arsenault’s eye, shut tightly). Arsenault’s photographs have a tactile quality that feels rooted in the domestic: the dirty bottoms of young feet; a soft carpet of fallen flower petals; the crinkly plastic of a bag holding a folded quilt – a photograph that recalls the picture of an American flag in a dry-cleaning bag by Mitch Epstein, another chronicler of shifting family relationships. In two images, a woman seems to struggle out of a constricting garment, pulling it up over her head, shedding a skin like a caterpillar poised to become a butterfly.
The photographs are mostly black and white, but the series is punctuated by a few soft color images as well: an explosion of tulle with the barest hint of blue; a green hose coiled below a window stuffed with brown-paper packages; a clothesline casting a zigzag shadow, holding a few plastic clothespins in pink and blue. For all of the landscapes and the dispassionate studies of surfaces, draped fabrics and dried leaves, there are also a few achingly tender pictures of people: Arsenault’s mother sitting in a chair, her legs riddled with varicose veins; two sleeping children, one of whom has flung his arm across the other; a Bandaid on a fingertip; a couple of nude self-portraits, Arsenault’s body partially concealed in both. From picture to picture, Arsenault moves in close and pulls back, which feels apt for the rhythm of the time of life she’s chronicling, leaning in toward her children, then closely regarding herself; watching over them as they sleep, then turning her focus outward. The craggy trunk of an old tree fill the frame of one photograph, the thick bark scarred with deep vertical ruts, the top partly missing. A rickety wooden ladder leans against it, going nowhere. If there was a treehouse there, it’s long gone. Change is inevitable, bittersweet, and full of promise.
Interview: Michelle Dunn Marsh and Sylvia Plachy
Michelle Dunn Marsh, the founder of Minor Matters, the Seattle-based photography book publisher, has championed many photographers over the years.
Roxana Marcoci
MoMA's senior photography curator talks about her cross-disciplinary approach to curatorial work, Wolfgang Tillmans, An-My Lê, and more.
Men in Decline, British Youth Culture, and a Slice of the American Upper Crust
Carolyn Drake takes a playful, sometimes perverse look at ordinary men, while Alasdair McLellan channels his inner fan boy, and Will Vogt photographs his own privileged circle over the years.
March – April 2007 About The Cover
Lisa Kereszi is a visual kleptomaniac. As the old ...
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.
A Trio of Photo Books Focus on Fashion
A Magazine Curated by Erdem immerses readers into the especially vivid queer sensitiblity of Erdem Moralioglu.
John Jacob
When John Jacob joined the Smithsonian American Ar...
Vince Aletti Dives into His Archive
photograph's editor, Jean Dykstra, speaks to longtime contributor Vince Aletti about his new book, The Drawer (Self Publish Be Happy).
Jon Henry
Jon Henry is the recipient of the 2020 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture for his series Stranger Fruit, portraits of Black mothers holding their sons in poses that suggest the pietà.
Dorothy Sing Zhang: Like Someone Alive
In cinematic images, a photographer meditates on the aesthetics of sleep.
Matjaz Tancic: 3DPRK: Portraits of North Korea at happylucky no.1
[caption id="attachment_30798" align="alignnone" w...
The Metaphysical Momentum of Wolfgang Tillmans
A sprawling exhibition at MoMA presents Wolfgang Tillmans’s work as a democratic gesture and a narrative of inclusion.