In class we've been watching a documentary about photographer Tierney Gearon and her work on
The Mother Project. The movie follows Tierney, her two kids, and her elderly mother. She goes everywhere with a camera which I really respect, because it's hard to do. The movie focuses on three main things. The first her relationship with her mother. We find out through the movie that her mother is ill with schizophrenia and how that has effected Tierney growing up and hows its influences her art. She talks about how since she was about twelve she's felt like she has had to take the parent role with her mom and in her photos of her children and mother together, sometime the child represents her in her up bringing. I think her photos of her mom are a way to express her complicated love towards her and to show that even through this illness her mother is still a beautiful and caring mother and person. The second focus is her relationship with her kids. I found her children delightful and very intelligent. They seem to be very free spirited and I think the way they've grown up with their mother (traveling, being in front of the camera, etc.) has made them very smart on issues that are greater then the average 10 and 6 year olds. Tierney's relationship with them is honest and she's very open with them. I really enjoyed watching her kids and watching them all interact. The third focus was on the issues surrounding her photography. She got a lot of heat for pictures of her children playing naked and doing "kid" things and many critics thought the pictures were child pornography. Another issue was that critics thought she was exploiting her mother and children for her own gain. Personally I don't think her pictures were exploitations of her family or pornographic. She's photographing things that around her and close to her. I don't think she's doing it out of a bad place. She's not asking her children to do something that they're not already doing. From the video she never asked the children to take their clothes off or look a certain way, if anything she just asked them to hold their position. As far as the issues with her mom, I think she's doing a lovely portrait of her mom. As her kids, I would love to look back on those as an adult and she the kind of woman she was. I really appreciated the documentary as a way to look behind the lens at the family.
A photographer that also had controversy was Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe did black and white portraits. He got a lot of heat for his homoerotic and sadomasochistic works. He was an openly gay photographer in a very homophobic time. I don't like some of his work but I can respect it.
