Richard Hines

Richard Hines photographs his young family: his wife Claire, his son Jacob and himself. Hines began “Pictures From (Inside)” over five years ago and the body of work has developed into a fascinating contemplation of the emotional intersection of individual lives and family lives, framed within current Western culture. The relationship between what is intimate and the larger society is only subtly touched on in the imagery itself. There is, in fact, a marked absence of other people, public spaces or even streetscapes. But the very private images are presented in chromogenic prints taken with a large-format camera, which, through their large scale, clarity and colour saturation, declare their affinity with advertising. The enigmatic narrative moments they portray, the dramatic strobe lighting and unusual compositions are attention-directing techniques that art and advertising continue to appropriate and reappropriate from one another.

In Chess, the details and outlines of glass chess pieces have been blurred, leaving the foreground blank. The white silhouettes of the pieces reach up into the middle ground, carrying a dreamy, halfnude Jacob off into some fairy world. Replace the boy with the image of a woman and you would have a lovely advertisement for perfume or cosmetics. What is disturbing about this entanglement of slick advertising techniques and private imagery is that it questions the very possibility of an authentic experience in mediasaturated society. What could be more authentic and intimate than the family snapshot with its haphazard framing, banal activities, its scenes of everyday life? The camera brings us close to the real, yet it is the camera itself that proves the ultimate impossibility of representing authentic experience. By exploiting the idea of the candid family snapshot, Hines emphasizes the fictive quality of a genre that could be considered to produce the most authentic of all images. He does this by staging or rearranging pedestrian moments of family life; ordinary, non-eventful—the antithesis of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” that relates what has just happened and anticipates what is to come.

Jacob on the Railing is a decidedly “non-decisive” moment in a family’s life. Jacob balances on a porch railing outside the family cottage. Behind him, a lake is visible. The picture is taken from the inside and the boy’s face is obscured by the window frame. Claire is lying on the couch in front of the window, looking up as if interrupted from sleep or a daydream. It is impossible to figure out what happened before or will happen next in this picture. It is also impossible to know whether this shot is candid or staged. Since neither authenticity nor the story can be determined, these questions become irrelevant and the image compels the viewer to look closer and create meaning from the few givens in this picture; we see Claire in a private moment from which both her son and her husband are excluded. It is her husband’s camera that interrupts her self-containment.

Hines’s camera breaks through the private moment but he also uses it to create scenes that allow the viewers to contemplate the emotional complexities of family life, even if they don’t relate to the fictional moments we see in the image. There is no way to tell what is really going on in the image A Piece of My Heart, where we find Claire (wistful, pensive, happy, tired) sitting on the edge of the bed, while Richard has paused in his reading and seems lost in thought. What does become clear to the viewer is a realization that the deepest, most private feelings generated by family life will remain untouched by the camera.

Taking the family snapshot from the vernacular into the world of art has been a practice of many modern and postmodern artists (Robert Frank, Michael Snow and Michel Campeau are photo artists who spring to mind), but few have brought this intensely personal subject matter as close to the realm of pervasive commercial imagery as Hines has done in “Pictures From (Inside).” In his recent MFA statement, Hines cites Tina Barney as one of his influences. This New York artist uses a documentary style for large-scale photographs of her family that have the look and feel of candid shots but are, in fact, carefully constructed. They invite a view of a wealthy lifestyle that remains exotic to most of us, while Hines’s family settings are closer to those of an average young professional family. We recognize the Ikea furniture in the bedroom, the standard built-in kitchen cabinets and the typical rustic interior decoration in the cottage.

In Sliced Apple we see Claire literally boxed in by the kitchen apparatuses. Kept in the shadow, her slightly bent posture and serious facial expression appear to signify the burden of our culture’s focus on efficiency, hygiene, health and style inherent in the kitchen equipment and furniture. The light shines on Jacob, the tender body of the child whose health seems the desired goal of the combined industrial and domestic endeavours that surround him. Jacob, staring at a piece of apple with an expression of slight dismay on his face, has given himself an inappropriate space in this smooth machinery; he sits right on the counter beside the stove. It is finding such nonconforming spaces that brings some relief from the manufactured societal pressures.

In “Pictures From (Inside),” the “Inside” remains between brackets, distanced, untouched by the camera. The most hidden, nonconforming space remains inside our heads. Hines’s images have a heartening message in a time when fear of loss of privacy intensifies with the ever-increasing sophistication of surveillance technology and spectacle-driven media. Bringing advertising techniques to bear on the family snapshot with its authenticity and intimate experiences creates a sense of discomfort, but in the end imparts the realization that no camera can begin to present the complex subjective and intersubjective emotions of family life. ■

“Pictures From (Inside)” was exhibited at Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Ottawa from June 2 to June 29, 2006.

Petra Halkes is an artist and writer living in Ottawa. Her book, Aspiring to the Landscape, On Painting and the Subject of Nature, was published this year by the University of Toronto Press.