Photographer Joel Meyerowitz is on the prowl.
He's looking for someone who interests him, to make a portrait -
to capture some truth about a person in a single frame.
(Meyerowitz) If I saw someone whose character radiated out in front of him,
I would say, "Stop.
"I need to take a photograph of you."
What you were doing the first time was really beautiful.
- (Man) I have to call my agent. - (Laughter)
I'll get him on the phone. "Could you get him to do what he's told to do?"
You know what? I'm gonna share you, I'm gonna take a portrait of you.
- Really? - Yeah, right in front.
Stand like you stood, right there.
- Right? - Yeah. Don't move.
Let me just take a quick reading.
Ow. Ow, that hurts. Ow.
- Stop it. Ow! - You're a big sissy, you.
Ow!
So, forget about me. Really give yourself through the camera.
Really give it the look... that is you.
I'm gonna watch you and see when I think you might actually give me
some mystery or secret that you are.
- I have a secret. - Whatever ferocious...
Don't look at me. You give that crazy look right in there.
Yeah. Oh, that was it, that was great.
Photographers have always pointed their cameras at us.
But what are they looking for?
From the liberated '60s to the me-me-me decade that was the '90s,
photography, like the times, went in search of the self.
It was a quest that was to take photographers
out of the studio and into the unknown.
It was a walk on the wild side.
(Siren)
New York. In the early '60s,
photographer Diane Arbus roamed these streets.
Although charming and quietly spoken,
she declared that the camera gave her the licence to strip away
what you want people to know about you
to reveal what you can't help people knowing about you.
A runaway from a well-to-do background,
Arbus spoke openly of photography's power
both to steal and exploit other people's faces and lives.
But in taking her pictures she tried, in her own words, to be good.
Photographers have always sought out certain kinds of marginalised subjects.
It's been one of the big controversies,
especially in recent years of the scholarship of photography,
whether or not photographers tend to prey upon vulnerable people,
people who are exposed socially, economically, culturally in some way.
I mean, look in the Depression era, how many of the down-and-out people
who were migrating from the Midwest to the West Coast got photographed.
That's cos you could get access to them. They were literally out in the streets.
This is a Walker Evans photograph
entitled Sharecroppers Prepare To Have Their Picture Taken.
Their faces reveal the emotions we all feel when someone wants to take our picture -
anticipation, indifference, nervous preparation...
even boredom.
But what about the man behind the camera?
Did Evans feel compassion for his downtrodden subjects
or was he simply driven by his hungry eye?
And what of Arbus? What appetites did she need to satisfy?
She was not threatening, she was curious.
And I think it was her real, native curiosity, her awe...
of their original individuality...
that loosened them up to be present.
And she also whispered when she spoke.
She was incredibly articulate and poetic...
(Whispers)... but when she spoke, she would just talk to you, right here.
And people would have to kind of lean in to hear her.
And the more they leaned in, you know, she was like...
She put the honey right there. And they kept leaning in until they were stuck.
And they liked it so they kept on licking and they were... they were in it.
(Nan Goldin) Arbus's work is genius but it's all about her.
It's all about her.
I felt that it was the work of somebody who wanted to be anybody but herself...
and she was trying on everybody else's skin.
And the degree of empathy -
which is so rare in any art - that she had
was because she so desperately
didn't want to be herself.
If Arbus photographed those in whom she recognised
her own anxieties and vulnerabilities,
those people were just as easily found in uptown society.
In 1969 she accepted a private commission
to photograph the rich and successful Konrad Matthaei and his family
over the Christmas holiday.
The Matthaeis had connections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
whose director suggested her because Arbus was herself connected
to many of the city's important taste-makers at the time.
She was a risky choice for the Matthaeis
but this was the age of radical chic.
We've been asked several times
why on earth would anybody hire Diane Arbus
to do a family shoot, a family portrait?
And the point was that we found her work unique and remarkable
and we were very pleased with the results.
Every year I would have a family portrait done by various photographers.
But they'd all been men.
I mean, I wanted to see my children as... you know, get good portraits of them
so this was sort of an annual event.
Diane was available and we were happy to have her.
Now that I look back at it
she may have needed the money.
My mother was really looking for someone
a museum would consider cutting-edge as opposed to...
I mean, she was well aware of what Diane Arbus's work was like.
We were so busy that she was going to have to get
what I call more snapshots between us because we were wandering and...
And therefore, to get the real portraits
she would probably have to spend some time with the children, which she did.
She took lots of pictures of them.
She didn't say, you know, "Look grumpy now,"
or "Look like Frankenstein now," or, "Look..." you know.
But I was, you know, right at the edge of adolescence.
You know, clearly I had been brought up to be well-mannered,
or at least I knew what good manners were,
and I was about at the point where I was going to stop having them
but not quite there yet.
And I think, looking into the photographs now, what I'm struck by
is how that rage and frustration seems to be popping out of my eyeballs,
although not really apparent anywhere else on my body.
I thought I did quite a good job, actually.
You know, she was raised in similar sort of stuffy circumstances
and I wonder if she didn't recognise
a bit of that sense of the crummy princess that she felt she was
in me at the time and see that sense of...
I'm not sure that they flattered anybody
but I thought they were very interesting pictures
and we have, you know, albums of photographs of us looking... great,
so the idea was to really get something that was of...
Although at that time we didn't know that she was going to be what she is today.
Of course there were standard ones -
the family-under-the-Monet sort of picture.
That's the standard one. We'd have to have that for everybody.
I think I'm sort of boring-looking in those pictures.
No, no.
I must say, I don't think she was particularly interested in me, I must say.
I mean, I think that... But I also was very busy running around,
getting the dinner on the table and talking to everybody,
so maybe I wasn't as available as other people were.
She liked the portrait of Marcella, I think, in the white dress.
I liked the portrait of Marcella sitting on a loveseat in a brown velvet dress.
She was sort of like this, sort of slumped.
Erm... not happy but, you know, resigned.
Diane seemed to have caught something that Marcella has become.
She caught a little bit of that.
Arbus didn't only catch personal unease.
She was instinctively witnessing the mood of a nation slipping into despair.
The community - and really, it was a politically liberal community
again who had had great hopes when Kennedy was elected -
then very rapidly began to get disillusioned
with the war in Vietnam and so forth and so on.
(Gunshot)
A mood that had overtaken the whole country by '67, '68,
of disaffection, of concern, of dismay.
Whatever side you were on, you felt the times were out of joint.
Well, Diane Arbus, in her own interest and following...
She had the kind of courage to follow
what were considered peculiar tastes in cultural milieus of different kinds.
Diane Arbus may never have found whatever she was looking for
in the streets, parks, flophouses and posh apartments of '60s New York.
If she did it wasn't to her liking.
In 1971, only two years after her Christmas at the Matthaeis,
she took her own life.
Her work tied into a mood that came along later and made her very famous -
a fame that was of course brought to an apotheosis,
a very tragic one, by her suicide.
But nevertheless, it made her herself the kind of personality
who maybe did represent something really seriously wrong with our culture.
Why commit suicide? It's a question that haunted all of us who knew her.
Because if photography was our reason for being -
and she was really in it -
if it couldn't sustain her we were in trouble.
To deal with ordinary, innocent people in some way
and try to get them to expose themselves to you in one frame
is a chancy thing, it's a challenge.
Rather than the set-up-studio shooting session of, let's say, Dick Avedon...
where there was a constant hammering away
until he pared the person down to whoever was left after it
and to whatever he... needed.
Having earned his reputation in the world of fashion,
Richard Avedon became the celebrity photographer of the age.
But his striking portraits of America's political and cultural elite
from the late '50s until his death in 2004
were the result of confrontation, not collaboration.
He took all control away from the sitter
and placed it firmly behind the camera.
This was far from the polite portraiture
of photographers like Cecil Beaton in the '30s and '40s...
a time when photography's job was simply to make the famous look divine.
Modern portraiture became impolite.
It dragged soft-focus celebrity out of its soft-focus world
and into an uglier, post-war, nuclear age.
The celebrity is particularly expert
at presenting a pre-packaged self to the world.
In attempting to capture the person behind the mask
photographer Tony Vaccaro approached his subjects with cunning
to ensure that his celebrity portraits reflected his opinions, not theirs.
They are always on guard.
All these people, they were always on guard.
Photography, to me,
is a form of placing that person you photograph on a pedestal.
Now, it is imperative
that the pedestal be the right size.
In other words, the picture has to have that special quality for that person,
what he has in here.
Forget about the appearance.
Once you determine the personality of an individual,
you have to narrow down to a word
that fits him more than any other word.
Somerset Maugham was suave.
How can I capture that word, "suave"?
And we're talking, he's walking towards the mirror.
I walk with him.
And at a certain point he does this
but then suddenly he becomes a snob, kind of thing and, "This is it, Tony."
And then you work... Bang! That's it. And it's all over.
(Duane Michals) I love portraits. I like taking portraits
but I never believe portraits because people are not what they appear to be.
I did a picture of my mother, my father and my brother
and they all look very nice. But it tells you nothing about the relationship.
It doesn't tell you that he was an alcoholic,
that he and his wife had a very unhappy marriage
and the alienation and all that.
In a way, it seems very strange that people tend to believe
that when you photograph somebody,
somehow you've captured somebody, you're revealing something.
And these are usually people you know nothing about.
That's why celebrities are so easy to photograph -
because they're pre-packaged.
Pablo Picasso had avoided the photographic portrait since 1959.
He finally granted Henri Cartier-Bresson an audience in 1966
and again in 1967.
But Bresson himself was unhappy with the results.
In the summer of '68 an exasperated Picasso
invited Tony Vaccaro to his home in the South of France.
So there he stands, you know.
And he goes like this, you see.
And I'm not clicking
so then he goes like this, you know. Then like this.
And I could tell. I said, "This is Avedon.
"This is Arnold Newman. This is..." You know.
I knew all the other photographers, the poses that he was giving.
And at a certain point I take my Leica and I go like this.
I said, "Something is not working."
So all of a sudden he... he just drops this mask that he was putting of himself
and then... Bang! ...I clicked.
The standoffs now being played out in front of the portrait photographer's camera
were partly a metaphor for an increasingly confrontational relationship
between politics, celebrity and the media.
In the States, the Vietnam War and Watergate
proved beyond doubt that their interests were no longer the same.
While America seemed to be unravelling at the seams,
Larry Clark was simply taking pictures of his own life in Tulsa, 0klahoma -
a life of hanging out with friends,
shooting drugs and guns
and getting laid.
Unlike Arbus and Avedon,
Clark was an insider, not an outsider -
a kind of neighbourhood photojournalist
bivouacked in a part of America no one had bothered to see,
certainly not that close up.
In his hands, photography became as personal and confessional
as the written diary
because he was one of them, not one of us.
You'd always expect a photographer to come along, find a scenario,
get to know it a bit, photograph it, then go away again.
He always photographed the things that were part of his own life
so that sort of a whole diary, if you like, of a way of telling a story,
was something he very much started.
Clark eventually published his intimate pictures as a book in 1971,
simply titled, Tulsa.
(Parr) He was more or less a kid hanging out with a camera.
It's only after the photographs were taken and the book was published
that I guess he would become aware of the fact that he was more of a photographer.
He just was hanging out there, taking photographs as he went along.
(Michals) Those Larry Clark Tulsa pictures were profound and important.
First of all, he opened up a whole new, impolite genre -
this really nasty thing that nobody wants to know about.
And these were not druggies hanging out in the Bowery or in Harlem -
these were nice, suburban people in Tulsa.
And that work was very authentic and very real.
There would have been intimate scenes done before this
but I guess no one put it together as a book.
All the pictures here, of course, became very saleable, very commercial.
This whole idea of the diary, which has become
an integral part of contemporary photography,
was really initiated as much by Clark as anyone else.
(Goldin) Tulsa had a huge influence on me because it gave me permission.
You know, the only thing you can really photograph is your own tribe.
You know, when they say that African tribes or North African tribes
are afraid of having their souls stolen by the camera,
who was holding the camera?
Look at me.
Look down.
There's a boom over your head.
That often happens.
My whole life is a boom over my head.
Nan Goldin's work is confessional photography at its most extreme -
a candid, insider's account of a world populated by transvestites, transsexuals...
There goes the TV.
...drug addicts and 24-hour party people.
I've always done this. There's just nothing to step on.
This is Joey, a transsexual Goldin has photographed over the last 20 years
as part of her love affair with what she calls the "third gender".
If Arbus had shown us how freaky normal people could be,
Goldin showed us the normality and humanity
of those often treated as freaks.
In 1972, when I lived with transsexuals
and transvestites in Boston,
they were hated by the gay community and despised by straight people.
They couldn't go out during the daytime.
They couldn't get any jobs.
It never once crossed my mind...
as to whether they were men dressed in women's clothes.
They were always, to me, a third gender.
Oh, that's beautiful. Marilyn never looked so good.
Marilyn Manson?
(Both laugh)
You are evil.
But so young.
The only people I really photograph are people I really love
and generally have known for years
and I've photographed them over the years.
They get to say what pictures are published or not.
I've only once in my life gotten a written erm... release.
Inspired by the films of Cassavetes and Fassbinder, not by photography,
Goldin created elaborate slideshows that were more like movies.
The most ambitious, The Ballad 0f Sexual Dependency,
comprised over 40 pieces of music
and 900 slides of her friends and adopted family.
She started showing it in the New York clubs in the late '70s
but by the mid '80s it was a celebrated gallery-piece
and a major influence on both the look and feel of contemporary culture.
The first showing was for Frank Zappa's birthday party
at the Mudd Club in New York in 1979
and I was holding the projector in my hands
and, you know, putting the slides in.
It's basically about the difficulty men and women have
maintaining relationships and...
the incompatibility of the sexes
and the... you know, distance and the misunderstandings
and... male violence and all the roles that women are given
and... relationships that... where you're sexually bound to somebody
that you may not be in any way appropriately matched with.
It's a, you know, piece that evolved
and evolved and evolved with the help of my friends.
And the first, you know, showings were for my friends.
Look at me, baby.
When I first had a camera I was completely silent
and photography was my first way to really communicate as an adolescent.
It was a way to seduce people.
It was my way to be fully present in the moment
but to be able to hold onto the moment at the same time...
so that I could save the moment but live the moment fully
without having to worry about remembering it.
And that was always the motivation of my photography.
So I could be there and get lost at the same time.
He gave me his card...
and he asked me to visit him out there.
But he... I think he thought I was a queen.
But he was jerking off and then he had erm...
an incredible large penis.
- And... - And a huge Coupe de Ville.
I didn't really notice the car.
And he was jerking off and then he drove around the block, came back...
I took a picture and he came while I photographed him.
I love that. I love to make people come by photographing them.
That's what I really wanna do.
In 1971, Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki
had already taken the principle of diary-photography
to new levels of intimacy.
He's a promiscuous photographer, snapping everything around him.
There are over 100 million people in Japan.
Araki must have photographed most of them.
His is a life completely accounted for
by photography and sex.
Serious photographer. I am serious photographer.
Yeah! (Laughs)
There is nothing Araki won't photograph.
He publishes a book of his exploits every month,
giving us an intimate, detailed picture of his daily life.
(Speaks Japanese)
(Translator) If you don't shoot photography you don't really remember much.
So having these photos does help me to remember.
I've reached the point now that I don't shoot what I don't want to remember.
I only shoot what I want to remember.
Araki became known in 1971
when he took a detailed photographic account of his honeymoon
with his new wife, Yoko,
which he self-published under the title Sentimental Journey -
images of quiet intimacy and explicit sexual encounters.
But he didn't stop there.
When Yoko died in 1990
he also photographed her final weeks in hospital
and her funeral.
He published those pictures, too, under the title Winter Journey.
Some of the honeymoon pictures were posed
but there aren't many smiles to be seen
and I don't really know now whether it was love.
Even when I asked her, Yoko said there was only one picture that she really liked -
the one of her asleep in the boat.
In Buddhism, there's a river you cross after death to enter Nirvana.
But she also looks like an embryo
and you can see that life is like a continuum.
But what really happened was that on honeymoon
most people have lots of sex, too much sex.
So the thing she was most looking forward to most on the honeymoon,
riding in the boat, we did it but she fell asleep
because she was tired from too much sex.
It's hard to say whether you can reveal the inner person with photography
but you have to be in the mindset that you're going to do that.
That should be your goal.
When you look at my black-and-white photography,
I feel that a lot of the time I can catch
the past, present and future of that person all in one shot.
For my wife, in the case of her death,
I almost feel that she lived and also died quickly
for me and for my photography.
That's the kind of woman she was.
Araki had documented every detail of a 20-year marriage.
But beyond the adult relationship lay the final frontier - the family.
We all have family pictures somewhere close to hand.
But as the world of photography became increasingly introspective,
subjective and confessional,
the door to family life, usually closed, was kicked wide open.
The very private was becoming very public.
Artist Richard Billingham
didn't care about how his family ought to look
when he turned his gaze on them and their situation
at the heart of working-class life in Thatcher's Britain.
Nor was he concerned about photography when he was living with his father, Ray.
He was simply a would-be painter in need of a patient model.
I was living in this tower block. There was just me and him.
He was an alcoholic. He would lie on the bed, drink, get to sleep,
wake up, drink, get to sleep. Didn't know if it was day or night.
But it was difficult to get him to keep still for more than, say, 20 minutes at a time
so I thought if I could take photographs of him, that would act as source material
for, you know, for these painti...
And then I could make more detailed paintings later on.
So that's how I first started taking photographs.
I'll show you the very first black-and-white photographs I took.
This guy here - I call him Psychedelic Sid -
he would come down every day like the milkman and he would erm...
He made his own homebrew
and he would put three bags of sugar in instead of one bag
and he would make this homebrew that was 10% alcohol.
And that's how my dad could afford to be an alcoholic,
cos he brought down the homebrew for my dad.
He would try to make his own photographs.
He'd say, "Take a photograph of me doing this."
And I would kind of do it reluctantly.
My dad, he really doesn't care if that knife goes in him
or the hammer comes down on his head.
It shows his vulnerability.
My mum had left at the time because of his incessant drinking.
She moved to a neighbouring tower block.
And I guess I was fascinated about him on his own in this room.
He'd created a psychological space around himself
where he could drink uninterruptedly.
He only went to the bog. He never used the kitchen or the living room or anything else.
I think this is the best black-and-white one that I took.
And then I started doing colour photographs
cos I got this job at Kwik Save
and I could afford to get the films processed at a colour lab.
Well, I say "colour lab". What, Happy Snaps or something like that.
I found that Tripleprint was the best for me
cos it was cheap but also they processed the prints so crappily
they gave me ideas for paintings more.
I put that bread in there so that he might eat.
Cos he never ate nothing for two years, while he was drinking.
I put that bread there so he might eat but he never ate it.
My dad had moved into my mum's place by this time.
And I couldn't believe how it looked, you know.
She'd had two years away from my dad
so erm... she'd created her own psychological space around herself
that was very carnivalesque and decorative.
There were dolls, jigsaws everywhere.
She'd got loads of pets by this time.
She'd got about ten cats and I think there were two, three dogs.
(Chuckles)
My dad's saying, "What d'you want from me?"
All photography is exploitive.
The only thing you can do is to try and make the photograph so artistically good
you overshadow that exploitive element
that's inherent in the medium.
So that's what I've tried to do.
Billingham's snapshots form a kind of family album
no ordinary family member would ever make, let alone show.
This is not a family life of fake smiles and awkward calendar events.
They're more like a backstage glimpse of the chaotic rehearsals.
It's a view that turned Billingham from a would-be painter
into a celebrated photographer.
Somebody came into the gallery one day and this was printed up large.
And this photographer, he said, "You know, you should have your mum's arm in focus."
But I wanted my dad's head in focus.
That's what it's really about - about him getting it from all sides.
And if my mum's arm was in focus
it would just be a sensational image of my mum's tattoos.
And this was like, you know, a famous photographer
and he said a dumb thing like that.
That's a bit like... There's a Velázquez painting it looks a bit like.
That's like the... the Goya painting.
The photographs that I've took that I don't consider as pieces
and I look at them, then I do see my family
and I think about them and they... I become a bit sentimental about them.
But these ones, no.
Photographing family life can be even more risky
when the camera and the power it gives us
is in the hands of the parents, not the kids.
This is rural Virginia, where Sally Mann photographed her three children,
Jessie, Emmett and Virginia,
growing up on the family farm in the late '80s.
Published under the title Immediate Family,
her images unintentionally expose a potential conflict of interest
between being a good mother and a good artist.
Her pictures of a childhood idyll,
beset by implied dangers and adult glances,
met with unease in an America slipping from Reagan
into the reign of George Bush Senior.
Her son, Jessie, is visiting the farm today.
Mann continues to take portraits of her children as they grow up.
Their photographic collaborations have become part of family life.
(Mann) Taking pictures deepens the transaction
between me and family members that I photograph.
And it, in a certain sense, can complicate it a little bit.
Erm... But I feel that it also strengthened it a great deal.
As we were putting the work together over the years,
they would say, "Oh, I don't want that one in. I look stupid" or...
They've refined their vision
and their way of seeing how photographs work.
So, in a certain sense, doing that work sort of raised my stock with my family.
There's no way that I can get the pictures I do
without the children working their particular magic in the picture,
either by the way they shift their weight
or by the expression they give
or just some small gestural thing
that becomes the punctum of the image.
You don't get pictures like that
with expressions like that...
You can't force someone to do that. They have to give you the picture.
There's injury and there's... pain
and there's... anger and there's resentment in their faces
and there's, you know, pouting and there's...
It runs the gamut. Yeah, I certainly wanted to include all of that
as well as happy moments.
But family life is, of course, as we all know,
far more complex than it's usually portrayed.
Some artists have confronted the role photography itself has played
in creating and complicating our sense of domestic life.
Larry Sultan photographed his father and family
over a ten-year period spanning the '70s and '80s
as part of an elaborate project that included his parents' own photos,
home movies and statements.
This was the Reagan era, which preached the values of family life -
a version Sultan didn't recognise.
Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family.
And we go on vacations and we take these pictures
and then we look at them later and we say, "Well, isn't this a great family?"
So photography is instrumental in creating family,
and not only as a memento, a souvenir,
but also a kind of a mythology.
This is the house where Sultan grew up, in the Valley area of LA,
and where his father, Irvin, led a successful business life.
This is where his father lives now,
a gated community near Palm Springs.
As his son set about creating his version of the Sultan family experience,
Irvin struggled with the role his son now gave him.
(Thwack of golf ball)
You were so sceptical. Like, "OK, well, whatever.
"Whatever you wanna do is fine." But er, you know...
Well, I will admit one thing. I did get set and get comfortable
and he'd say to me, "Don't smile"...
which would absolutely irritate me
because when he says, "Don't smile," in my mind I've no idea what he's projecting.
"What is he trying to tell me what to do?"
I didn't want anyone to smile because, one, that would look ridiculous.
The pictures had a different weight, had a different body to it.
It wasn't a... It wasn't that kind of thing.
I remember that picture so distinctly and sitting on the bed...
shirt and tie, dressed up.
And I look like a forlorn, lost soul.
And I look at that picture and I said, "That's not me."
(Larry) Yeah, and in fact you went even further.
You said, "That's not me sitting on the bed - that's you sitting on the bed.
- "That's a self-portrait." - (Laughs)
And I thought that was right. And you said this, too -
you said, "Any time you show that picture you should tell people
"that that's not me sitting on the bed
"looking all dressed up with nowhere to go, depressed.
"That's you sitting on the bed, and I'm happy to help you with the project
"but let's get things straight here."
That famous picture of you watching TV and Mom posing...
- Oh, yes. - I have the proof sheet.
You were both standing there
and I was photographing you both against the green wall.
And because I was taking so long and I was so clumsy,
you said, "To hell with you," and you sat down and you watched the game.
And then Jean... gave me that look.
Like, "Oh, you've been abandoned again."
She said, "I don't care how I look as long as you're successful."
Which is such a great Jewish-mother thing to say.
The very fact that I didn't follow the path
of going to law school or whatever and I became an artist
was a point of great contention between us.
You would say things like, "You're gonna be a loser, you're gonna..." blah blah.
I had to go through a lot of hell...
to do what I do.
And part of the work came out of... that wound.
The daily practice of being a photographer is to be distanced,
to have a little bit of room between what you're doing
and how you see, what you look at.
For me, the biggest surprise
was that the distance that I thought I needed as a photographer slipped.
It wasn't about these people, it was about us.
It really showed, in a subtle way...
the tremendous love, feeling and thoughtfulness on his part,
not to hurt me, not to do anything that I would find objectionable
but deep, genuine feeling toward me
which, of course, warmed my heart, too.
And we've always felt that way and...
- Then and since. - Mm-hm.
At least now he's gonna buy dinner.
Dream on.
During the ten years Sultan had been making his Pictures From Home series,
a seismic shift in thinking about contemporary culture had taken place.
From French philosophy, down through academia
and into the lofts of New York's SoHo
came the steady drip, drip, drip of postmodernism.
It was only a matter of time before it seeped into the photographic darkroom.
The premise of postmodernism
is that we now live in a culture so saturated with media imagery
and media models of how people live
that our idea of how one lives one's life, of who one is,
is made up of that kind of media myth.
And in a sense it negates the idea of portraiture,
the idea that you can dress up and go to a studio
and somehow reveal your strength of character
or your inherent humanity or whatever.
You don't have any inherent humanity in the postmodernist analysis of things.
We're all these composites
of a lot of myths and narratives written by other people.
But you can still dress up,
which is exactly what artist Cindy Sherman loved doing.
She turned a familiar children's game - dressing up as someone else - into art
by photographing the result.
# I don't know how it happened
# I think I had been drinking
# I think I saw you naked... #
In her series called Untitled Film Stills,
Sherman created over 100 publicity-style shots
reminiscent of scenes from old B-movies.
She appears in every one
as a general type we seem to recognise only too well.
In denying her own identity
she also captured something of the times.
(Danto) She's got this incredible plasticity.
You wouldn't recognise her in the street.
I think many people originally felt that she...
these were self-portraits - Self-Portrait As... And so on and so forth.
But she didn't do that.
I don't think she's done a portrait of anybody.
These are all imaginary creatures.
She's just The Girl, capital G, in this situation and that situation -
she's in danger, she's in love, she's opening a letter
like the starlet who has no identity other than the identity that the director gives her.
He says, "You're gonna be a nurse in this film.
"You're going to be a secretary in this film."
Who is this?
Marilyn Monroe, Cindy Sherman as Marilyn or the real Cindy Sherman?
The queen of no identity
now doesn't even venture into the streets to make her pictures...
...whoever she is.
She's her own director, she's her own cameraman, she's her...
I don't know what a best boy is but she's the best boy.
She doesn't even have an assistant, basically.
She's just got this table er... with wigs and so forth
and a mirror.
When I first met her I said, "Why did you stop doing the Untitled Film Stills?"
And she said, "I ran out of clichés."
And so she had the sense that these were all, as it were, archetypes.
There's a kind of instant recognition
of what that person wearing those clothes in that room has to be concerned with.
The belief in photography's ability to glimpse an essential self in a single frame
was now under attack.
What had the intimate photography of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark
really revealed about the lives of its subjects?
Well, I mean, I think... if you want an erection in your photograph...
I happen to be an admirer of Larry Clark's work.
But I'm not convinced that intimacy
necessarily leads to...
a more truthful situation than not.
There is such a thing as photographic truth
but that... the truth is rarely relevant to the specifics of the image.
You know, that person is probably not what you think they're like.
But what you think they're like is probably true, just not about them.
DiCorcia's work challenges photography's claim to authenticity or genuine empathy
when it comes to representing the lives of others.
For his series called Hollywood
he transformed corners of Santa Monica Boulevard in LA
into a film set, artificially lit and composed.
He then recruited the boulevard's male hustlers to pose for him,
paying them with money he'd received as a government grant.
This was a collaboration between photographer and subject
in which the photographer 'fessed up to being a kind of hustler himself -
a Diane Arbus with a chequebook.
To emphasise the mercenary nature of the photographic transaction,
captions detail the hustler's name, his home town and his rate.
The concept, before I even started,
was that I would pay them
the same amount of money to be photographed as, you know,
the lowest-common-denominator sex act on the street,
which people still don't believe is $20 but erm... the...
Well, there is inflation, I know.
Anyway, there's an aspect of what they do
which has to do with the presentation of self.
It's also the fact that they're a kind of commodity
and this... it's kind of a label.
They are on Santa Monica Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood, basically.
They often present themselves as stereotypes, you know,
as a way of selling themselves.
And I thought that there was a real metaphorical connection
between... them and Hollywood.
It was essential, to make the thing complete,
that there be this exchange, that the money that I was giving them
be the money that the NEA had given me.
And that somehow the photographic act
was a substitute for the sex act.
You know, that there was this exchange
that, I think, is part of photography.
There is an exchange, there is a collaborative aspect,
especially in staged photography.
The way it was set up was I would arrange the picture beforehand with an assistant
and everything would be left - the camera on the tripod in the position, the lights.
And then I would get into a car
and drive down Santa Monica Boulevard and approach them
and basically just say, "Listen, I'd like to take your photograph.
"There's no sex involved."
If they were real hustlers then they would just try to get the maximum out of me.
The minute I had taken even one frame
they wanted to get out the door, they wanted to get their money and go.
Very often, though, they were not that way
and we would change things around and...
I wouldn't say they suggested anything.
I mean, it's not like it's so much choice or...
At any one time of day it could be that there's nobody there, you know.
The police sweep the street and they're gone for a couple of days.
But when we face the final frontier that is the mirror,
is there really no-one at home?
Just a collection of clichés we've picked up along the way?
For some, photography is still the medium that engages directly with life,
exploring it, exposing it,
sometimes even preserving it.
Photography has actually saved my life many times.
I've walked through a lot of things I'm afraid of
by photographing them. Literally.
Photographing myself after I was battered
prevented me from going back to my lover...
because, you know, it prevented my memory from being coloured by nostalgia.
You know, I was still in love with him but I couldn't...
You know, I had the picture there of what I looked like a month after I was battered.
And I couldn't go back to that.
I don't think I realised that that's what the picture was for.
I just wanted to see what it looked like.
Photography has enabled me to never lose anyone.
Or so I thought.
And then, when my best friend died in 1989
I had a big... kind of epiphany
when I realised that I really had lost her, no matter how many pictures I had of her,
and photography had failed me...
because it doesn't do what I thought it would do at the beginning,
which is save people's lives.
Can I see the shoulder on the other side?
- It's like this scene in Sunset Boulevard. - I know. It is.
Are you ready for your close-up?