Close To Home
Review
Perhaps because imagemaking and wordsmithing emanate from different sides of the brain, very few artists have attempted, successfully at any rate, to produce books in which they both wrote the text and made the pictures. The idea that words can illuminate pictures and that pictures can illustrate words is, of course, not a new one. What is trickier, however, is to forge a certain alloy of words and pictures that meld together into a cohesive narrative that fills the void between the two. But such is the accomplishment of Lincoln photographer John Spence in his new book, Close to Home, a surprising and unconventional symbiosis of text and photographs which reveals two parallel mythologies, one autobiographical and the other a personal artistic vision of the eternal feminine.
The title, Close to Home, would seem to be a double entendre, referring, on the one hand, to the fact that all of the images were made within a few miles of the artist’s home, a circumstance that stakes out a certain philosophical position in regard to the art of photography, namely that one need not travel to the ends of the earth to find the raw materials from which to form one’s art. A clue to the other meaning of the title can be found in a passage where Spence, speaking of himself in the third person, says, “I guess he felt his stuff was pretty close to home—much closer than he really wanted anyone personally to know.” By his “stuff” he means, of course, his work, his photographs, this book.
Spence constructs a text (or perhaps invents a new literary genre: call it mythological autobiography) that is part stream-of-consciousness, part poetry, and part personal mythology, and then intermingles it with photographs of various women that he has taken over the years. What relation these images bear to the text is not really clear. Correspondences are implied, but left unstated. Rather, the images and the text seem to float together in an ethereal space that is neither literal nor wholly imagined.
The photographs themselves are deceptively simple, made without artifice or pretense and with no apparent effort to “interpret” the personality of the subject. Typically, a woman is seen full-length—clothed, nude or somewhere in between— centered in a large space, a room or a landscape. She calmly confronts the viewer with her eyes; her pose is natural, without inflected gestures or dramatic intent, yet she seems to occupy the space around her the way a planet occupies its orbit: as dominant object and indomitable force.
At one point in the text Spence muses on one of photography’s perennial questions, whether photographs can capture the inner essence of a person or merely record the transitory ripples of emotion that move across the surface of the skin. But to me, these photographs seem to suggest that though they may not tell you everything there is to know about these women, they tell you all you need to know. Taken together, the text and the photographs probably tell you all you need to know about the artist, too, and more, perhaps, than he intended to tell you.
