January 12 – February 26, 2023
Artist Reception – Saturday 14 January, 2023 4 to 6pm
Online Artist Panel – Thursday 9 February, 2023 2 to 3.30pm
Family Album: Home Is Where the Heart Is
It is intriguing that some artists choose to open their lives to strangers through the art that they create and share with the world. Familial holiday exuberance is one thing, but intimate moments and self-reflection are quite another. Nonetheless, the American Judith Black and Norwegian Bjørn Sterri zealously photograph their family members day after day, year after year, seeking to record the ordinary as well as the significant times in their lives. Through their eyes, we witness an unvarnished chronicle of family, a narrative that can be passed from one generation to another.
What began in 1979 as a single self-portrait for Judith Black’s graduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology evolved into a meditative record of family life – her motherhood, the children’s innocence, teenage self-awareness and, ultimately, their passage into adulthood. Posing in front of a large-format view camera set on a tripod, Black’s subjects are participants in the making of each photograph. They are not stage-managed. They offer themselves with their youthful candor and adolescent complexities to the unforgiving eye of the camera.
The image of Black, nude and pregnant with her first child, predicts the candor and openness of her portraits. Later, we see her partner Rob, as step-father, and her children – Laura, Johanna, Erik and Dylan — gathered with her on the porch, ready to celebrate Mother’s Day; Dylan, sporting a black eye, having just been jumped on the street; and Laura next to David Bowie’s likeness on her closet door. Black religiously tracks her children’s physical and emotional transformation, but less frequently reveals her own likeness. She is the accomplished, capable presence who is creating a visual diary of her family’s journey through life and who occasionally makes self-portraits at significant, perhaps somewhat vulnerable, moments. “These photographs,” Black states, “are a way for me to remember both the pleasures and pains of being part of and raising a family. Talismans, relics, fetish objects, memory holders – they are mine to touch.”
For Bjørn Sterri, photographing his family is a passion. Seemingly an ever-present dad, he documents his boys, Jens Linus and Pablo, capturing mischievous behavior, play, tantrums and other distinct markers of childhood. Similarly, he pursues his wife Alejandra with his camera. His mission is to catch her every nuance on film – her warmth, humor, unbridled energy as well the outpouring of love she focuses on him and the children. She is adored.
Sterri, of course, inhabits this world, too. Using a small format SX-70 camera, he frequently interjects himself into the camera’s view, appearing as a shadow on a whitewashed wall or next to his child sunning himself on a sandy beach. Sterri becomes part of the background in his photographs of his family. These traces of himself are proof of his existence.
Adopted at the age of three and a half, he had no knowledge of his roots, so photographing his family is as much about himself as it is about them. By obsessively making formal black-and-white portraits of his family during the last 20 years, he creates his own history. His camera of choice is an 8×10 Deardorff securely placed on a tripod. Sterri repeatedly positions his family in a favorite, natural landscape or gathered in front of walls at home where they stare, occasionally smile, embrace, and make faces at the camera. Mom, Dad and the next generation are side by side. Sterri celebrates these passing moments, yet his mood seems bittersweet. Nothing remains unchanged. The world turns.
Barbara Hitchcock, Independent Curator and former Curator, The Polaroid Collection.
About the Artists
Judith Black received her Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981 and was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. She taught in the Art Department at Wellesley College for 25 years. Black’s work has been collected and exhibited in museums, from the Museum of Modern Art, New York to museums, institutions and galleries across the globe.
Bjørn Sterri studied photography at the University of Arts and Craft in Stockholm, Sweden and at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland. His photographs have been exhibited across Europe and the Americas, with exhibitions at Museo de la Univesidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain; Paris Photo, Paris, France; and Museo de la Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina, among others.
