Collapsing the Directorial and the Documentary: The Discomforting Family Portraiture of Tina Barney and Larry Sultan

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” Addressing the nation at the end of a turbulent decade, Ronald Reagan closed his 1989 farewell speech with a fitting reaffirmation of family values. Under the actor-turned-president’s auspices, the eighties cultural zeitgeist domineered a conservative social and political landscape with doctrines of traditional gender roles and sexual morality. Amidst a proliferation of nuclear household imagery in commercial media and entertainment, many photographers challenged prevailing ideas of the family. Tina Barney’s focus on the affluent family was particularly unprecedented. Historically (and to this day), America’s elite had the privilege of privacy: whereas the impoverished tenant farmer or homeless youth struggled to refuse the government-sponsored intrusion of a documentary lens, the elites could easily refuse the photographer’s entry. If they did allow photographers in, they brandished an unspoken contract promising themselves control over what appeared in the photograph. Barney was able to overcome the access barrier due to her rank in the New England elite. Over the course of fifteen years, she photographed family and friends in their various luxurious residences. Larry Sultan similarly photographed his parents in their home, but differed widely from Barney in his exploration of the neglected older middle class. I mainly discuss how Tina Barney’s discomforting 1987 work Jill and Polly in the Bathroom exemplifies the collapse of the directorial and the documentary modes, prompting me to reflect on the concept of fiction in domestic contexts and read her work with both sympathetic curiosity and significant apathy. To expand my discussion of tense fiction and explore the unconventional relation of artist to subject, I bring in Larry Sultan’s 1984 work My Mother Posing for Me.

When I look at Jill and Polly, I’m unsure about what exactly is fact and what exactly is fictitious, if even a distinction can be drawn. It is an exhausting image to parse. Two women stand at the end of a meticulously decorated bathroom. Their pink robes notably match the pink walls; in fact, every detail seems to correspond. The lefthand woman’s glasses match the hairbrush, which matches flowers on the curtains, which match the dishes on the counter (and so on). This suffocatingly fastidious interior design is not made any more approachable by the tension between the two women. Although their bodies face each other, they do not meet each other’s eyes. The woman on the left addresses the viewer with raised eyebrows and a hand on her hip, while her companion shifts her gaze downwards with a vague smile. I am not welcome in the scene and I don’t know if I’d ever want to be, as it leaves me feeling slightly perturbed. Certainly, these are Tina Barney’s real loved ones. Certainly, this is the real bathroom Jill and Polly use. Yet, although photographing “real” life might seem sufficient for conveying authenticity, or at least a sort of genuine charm, the scene appears more artificial than anything else. The decor reminds me of a Laurie Simmons dollhouse tableau, carefully arranged with minute details and coordinated palettes. To what extent did Jill and Polly arrange their tableau-like bathroom prior to letting Barney shoot? How much of the scene can I trust? Even if Barney had barged into the bathroom, without telling Jill and Polly of her plans, and snapped a surprise photo, would the composition necessarily be “real?” After all, these women likely decorated the bathroom anticipating guests. They probably were careful to curate a tasteful display, if not for Barney’s lens then for some judgmental distant relatives staying the night. Especially as women, their home is judged as an extension of themselves, another stage on which to perform their femininity and affluence. The fictional quality of performance thus complicates the notion of the documentary scene. I’m led to wonder about the layers of fiction inscribed on a factual setting, and how not only Barney directs her subjects, but also how the subjects direct the presentation of themselves through material goods. There is no clear-cut fact or fiction, but rather an ambiguous mode between the two.

What seems more real (or at least a commentary on her real experiences) is the pervasive social and psychological division, which engenders conflicting responses in me. Jill and Polly’s closed off attitudes create a distinct awkwardness that contrasts the typical family snapshot of a cherished memory or an intimate portrait of a loved one. Whereas I tend to see these conventional modes present rosy imagery of the family structure, this photo attunes me to the apparent complexity of the elites’ familial relationships, focusing on the fraught emotional charges that underlie banal moments. On one hand, this tension urges a desire to understand. There is perhaps something overwhelmingly demanding about wealth, how insists that its possessors keep up perfect appearances. Perhaps it redirects family members’ attention towards their own vain, self-interested pursuits at the cost of true love and emotional connection. Perhaps Barney has successfully shown that money can’t buy happiness. The more cynical critic in me is less generous. My experience with this photograph is complicated with a sense of apathy that intensifies the longer I inspect the scene. It is difficult to look at ostentatious wealth and bemoan the subjects’ tense relationship—although clearly awkward, the cause of it remains opaque. I do not know exactly what has brought about this awkwardness. Is it the misunderstood silent suffering of the emotionally-stunted rich, or something less devastating? Am I supposed to lament the hardship of selecting the right floral curtains? The subjects appear fussy and materialistic, their home overcrowded and impersonal, too obsessed with gesticulating at their generational wealth to invite me into their space. It is difficult for Barney to elicit sympathy when the alienation between the subject and typical viewer is so extreme. Perhaps money can buy forms of happiness after all, or at least security and comfort that provide the foundation for it—the Barney family’s tension very well may be an individual phenomenon, not a general symptom of affluence that begs my affection.

I feel compelled to bring in Larry Sultan’s 1984 work My Mother Posing for Me, curious to see how, in spite of certain compositional and thematic similarities, it leads me to a different reading of its tense familial relations and flips conventional artist-subject relations. Sultan similarly aims to disrupt the mythology of the family. Somewhat like John Coplans’ male nudes, his series Pictures from Home offers a glimpse into the experience of the elderly in the social periphery, confronting his parents’ absence from cultural and artistic imagination as middle-class retirees. His 1984 work My Mother Posing for Me is similar to Barney’s Jill and Polly in the Bathroom in that both pose two family members in their real domestic spaces. Both photographers point their subjects in different directions to thematize familial tension. Both righthand figures even pose awkwardly by a vertical drape. Sultan’s parents do not come close, however, to the manicured appearance of Jill and Polly. The simple flourishes of the shelf and the mother’s satin shirt and makeup are not enough to revel in; the shelf is almost bare and power cords are exposed. Instead of generating an indulgent air, the garishly-saturated photo is tinged with a bleak humdrum. The poignancy of the mother’s direct address and the parents’ avoidance of each other generates indeterminate readings. What I read is not a family ruptured by an excess of wealth, but a family potentially suspended in a state of uncertainty or awkwardness concerning social identity and economic status. In a society based on the endless pursuit of raises, promotions, and titles, what do you do after you retire? How do or can you present yourself when you don’t have a considerable excess of wealth to enable your post-retirement dreams? Perhaps the father is looking at the athlete onscreen with a longing to be transported back to (what would be culturally deemed) his prime. Perhaps the mother’s unreadable expression masks a frustration with her husband for his attachment to the TV or a yearning for an escape. Perhaps she is silently imploring her son to abandon the camera and ask to play a family game like he did when he was little. Indeed, the very notion of a son photographing his parents confounds both the photographer’s and subjects’ conceptions of identity. The son has a job and the parents do not. In this inverted hierarchy, the son orchestrates a record of familial memory and shuffles his parents around like puppets to his liking. Sultan’s relation to his subjects pushes me to consider whether there is any unintended tension generated in the process of staging these photos. Are the parents begrudging or eager participants in his half-directorial, half-documentary exploits? Are they, although distant with each other in their own way, unified in a similar attitude towards their son’s ambitions? Like with Barney’s family, the particulars of their relations are less important than the general disquieting unease. With its multiple layers of tension that rise to the surface, My Mother Posing for Me is an unflinchingly unconventional representation of the family.

The collapse of the directorial and the documentary characterizes Barney’s and Sultan’s photographic projects, made thoroughly different by the artists’ different socioeconomic statuses and artistic missions. In a critical portrait of American aristocracy, Barney generates confounding readings of her subjects previously not well-explored in photography. I take away a new consideration of the fictions in domestic space and meditations on the extent to which I appreciate Barney’s sensitive rendering of the plight of the rich. With Sultan’s work, I interest myself in the different possible tensions, real or fictitious, in the familial triangle, and contemplate how his relation as a photographer to his subjects affects said tensions. Both photographers scratch the surface of the family record to reveal its uneasy undercurrents, turning banal scenes of staged domesticity into generative, poignant commentaries. To say the least, Barney and Sultan leave no indication that great change is happening at their dinner tables.

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Cover image: L: Tina Barney, Jill and Polly in the Bathroom (detail), 1987, chromogenic print. Kasmin Gallery, NY. Via NYTimes. R: Larry Sultan, My Mother Posing for Me (detail), from the series Pictures from Home, 1984, chromogenic print. Via SFMoMA.