Staging Photography

Jenna Maurice’s senior exhibition in the Watkins College Brownlee O. Currie gallery was a group of large format photographs of her family. With the collaboration of her three sisters and her parents Jenna elaborately staged a series of common domestic spaces, laboriously constructing each family photo. Calling her project So Successfully Disguised To Ourselves, Jenna’s images make a public stage of intensely personal people and places. The crystal, commercial clarity of the images recall the elaborately staged photos of Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. The images are carefully lit and carefully arranged, and the actors, her family and herself, have exaggerated facial expressions and poses and are often captured in the midst of a domestic narrative.

The images are a product of family discussions. The project required that Jenna and her family negotiate the details of each image. In one set of photographs the sisters came together as a collective to discuss each others’ personality traits and from there decide upon an image to represent that sister. Giving creative control to her sisters, then Jenna collaborated with each separately to create a self-portrait.

The show culminated in family portraita standing knee and ankle deep in a river; the family, often posed in front of an artificial backdrop, are placed antagonistically and literally inside the placid landscape. The disjunction is highlighted by the domestic props each figure holds. The highly posed image is at odds with the natural surroundings. They look at the camera with stoic resignation. In the middle sits the father in his armchair framed on his right by the mother and the two younger sisters. Too his left stands Jenna and to the left of her the oldest sister. The horizontal line of heads is reinforced by the horizon of the bank. The vertical full-length figures are placed parallel to the picture plane. The family is gridded across the surface making the image stabile and rigid. The hands, which lead through the image like a ribbon, tell the narrative of familial relationships: the youngest sister wraps an arm around her sister, who rest her hand on the mother’s shoulder, who rests her hand on the father’s shoulder. The prop that each carries represents and embodies the person and their position within the family unit, as in the father’s throne\arm chair. They are dramatic overstatements, the mother with a domestic water pale, and Jenna with a shepherd’s crook. All the posing is undermined by the fact that they stand almost knee deep in a river. Everything makes the pose explicit. The image is about posing. The stabile conventions of family portraiture are made ludicrous by the over extension of the pose. The mediated and the constructed experience is wholly not the truthful, lived moment that the photograph, by its nature, must show. Jenna finds the place where the intimacy of the family is denied by the pressures of social posturing, where the casual and private is judged within a public framework and the family takes on the role of a social institution.

Family portraiture seeks to freeze experience, to make a convention out of the raw and unique chaos of experience. Portrait photography still retains the residue of its grandfather, portrait painting; its still clarity, its pageantry and authoritative grandiosity. Conventional family portraiture is arranged to remove particularity, the family’s oddities. The family portrait regurgitates conventions. It is a theater of memories in which the symbol of a stabile and conventional family is acted out. Jenna disrupts the portrait’s conventions by revealing the artifice of the image and by introducing a theatrical element.

Jenna’s project was to break the social postures in the ironic double play of acting out the postures, posing poses. The family becomes unique and specific only by consciously mimicking another family and another image; their individuality is forced into an ironic posture. The posturing required of social life disguises mother from daughter and sister from sister. The representation of Jenna’s intimate family is negotiated by the public theater.

visit Jenna’s website, it’s slick.