Yes. I realize “good insight” (per my comment above) can be taken to imply a carefully thought out and planned thing, when in fact it was: notice eye-catching movement/pose, raise camera, click, develop, print, “oohh…that works, must do more of it!”, do more of it and just keep on doing it.
There’s a home recording of John Lennon working on Strawberry Fields Forever. The impression you don’t get listening to it is that he has any idea he’s creating one of the most beloved songs in rock & roll history. Instead he runs through the song over & over, kinda haltingly, likely aware he hasn’t quite got it. At one point he gets annoyed with his guitar playing: “I cannae do it!” (in a faux Scots accent). There’s no magic moment or burst of insight. Yet all the mundane repetition and stumbling eventully turned into The Song.
-Dave-
Looking at lots of her pictures online, I keep coming to the thought that she is really a cross between the positive aspects (depending on us, of course) of David Hamilton and the less savoury ones of Diane Arbus.
She shares Hamilton's acute sense of youthful beauty but, often, betrays it with touches of grit that do little to enhace the whole, except that that`s perhaps the very whole after which she strives. I'm perhaps more uncomfortable with the series
Twelve than with her own straight family images; is that because I sense a sort of misplaced adult aura of enjoyment, of incipient gratification in the people with whom the children are sometimes interacting? Is that my own mind playing unwelcome games or am I reading correctly? Who knows - perhaps that's where her skill lies: creating these uncomfortable questions of the self.
The "cabin" location may or may not be typical of her area - I don't know that; what I do know is that I would hate to spend time there. I dislike the sense of disorder and chaos that the terrace area represets, with all those bits of miscellaneous junk everywhere; what sort of mind can either gather all that or live with it? It's been written that she has espoused a white trash ethic for its sense of primitive power without sophistication - dumb brute, if you will - but that the family was never actually poor, both parents being the progeny of doctors, one of whom did his rounds in an Aston Martin. So is she actually faking it? If she is, does that make her a transgressor, an exploiter of both poverty and children? Nope I am not saying that is so; I simply know that those questions arise without definitive answers which, again, may be a huge part of her manipulative skill, her mastery of the strings that pull the puppets: us.
Some time ago I was greatly moved by a film of her southern landscapes, dark, misty and brooding exercises in mood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EiW9KIZy-cI may have posted it before, but never mind, it is relevant here. Yet, is the strength of the work powerful enough to be viewed without the music and without the subconscious connotations one bears, internalised, from her other work with family? In essence: does her family history empower the landscape work?
There are very few other photographers of whom one can have as many questions that, really, ask the same questions of the questioner.
How much safer my life feels in the warm embraces of Sarah Moon, Saul Leiter and Hans Feurer!
Rob