{"id":90397,"date":"2021-11-07T17:05:21","date_gmt":"2021-11-07T15:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=90397"},"modified":"2021-11-03T08:19:06","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T06:19:06","slug":"04-05-68","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=90397","title":{"rendered":"Family Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Family Matters<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

LESLIE CAMHI<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Gillian Laub, \u2018Grandpa helping Grandma out,\u2019 1999, from \u2018Family Matters\u2019 (Aperture, 2021)\u00a9 GILLIAN LAUB<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Gillian Laub\u2019s new book of photos takes an incisive look at her colorful, loving Jewish family, their politics, and the hard questions in between.<\/span><\/h4>\n

Just days before the opening of \u201cFamily Matters,\u201d Gillian Laub\u2019s solo exhibition at Manhattan\u2019s International Center for Photography\u2014a multimedia presentation including text messages, voice mail recordings and 20 years\u2019 worth of Laub\u2019s photographs of her wealthy, over-the-top, in-your-face, loving, generous, and exceedingly <\/em>expressive, suburban Jewish family, whose sudden turn Trumpward, in 2016, rocked her world\u2014I went to visit the photographer in the Tribeca loft that serves as both her studio and the home she shares with her husband, an Israeli writer, and their two young daughters.<\/span><\/p>\n

On a nearby flat file sat a dozen small, laminated photographic cutouts which Laub\u2019s late grandparents brought back from a trip to New Mexico, where they visited a photo studio and dressed up in Southwestern garb; the elderly Jewish couple, incongruous in cowboy boots, jeans, and bolo ties, smooching and otherwise hamming it up for the camera, appeared uncannily animated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hanging on a far wall was a more sober portrait: a classic, black-and-white photograph from the 1930s, showing the pioneering photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White (the first woman photographer on the staff of Life<\/em> magazine) setting up a shot while perched precariously on a gargoyle jutting from the Chrysler Building, 61 floors above the streets of Manhattan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gillian Laub: \u2018Family Matters\u2019 (Aperture, 2021)AVAILABLE AT APERTURE.ORG\/BOOKS\/GILLIAN-LAUB-FAMILY-MATTERS\/<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I think I know why Laub loves this picture. For decades in her own work, she\u2019s navigated the thinnest of margins, threading her way through religious and racially motivated conflicts and painful political divisions. Her first book, Testimony<\/a>, <\/em><\/span><\/strong>focused on individual Jewish and Arab civilians in Israel and the West Bank who had suffered the effects, in their bodies, minds, and hearts, of the Second Intifada\u2019s violence\u2014the maimed survivors of suicide bombings, reprisal attacks by settlers, or random landmines. Countering the constant rattle of sensationalist headlines, Laub\u2019s preternaturally calm portraits, accompanied by the words of survivors, delved deep into Israel\u2019s torn and fraying social fabric, finding common threads of humanity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her second book, Southern Rites<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/span>, began as a magazine assignment in 2002, when a student in Mount Vernon, a small town in south-central Georgia, wrote to editors at Spin<\/em> to protest her high school\u2019s racially segregated proms, which she and her boyfriend, a biracial couple, had been prevented from attending. After completing that first assignment, Laub returned repeatedly to Mount Vernon, slowly gaining the trust of more students, while also getting her car\u2019s tires slashed and being threatened with further violence. When her photo essay, \u201cA Prom Divided,\u201d was published in The New York Times Magazine<\/em> in May 2009, it provoked national outrage, and afterward local parents voted to integrate the prom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet two years later, tragedy struck: A 22-year-old African American man, the prom date of a student to whom Laub had become close, was shot and killed by a 62-year-old white man. The documentary Laub directed and co-produced for HBO (also called Southern Rites<\/em>), begins with the story of the proms but moves on to consider the impact of race on the murder, the trial, and its aftermath. One of Laub\u2019s great gifts as a portraitist is to suspend judgment, to see people in their full human complexity, while at the same time piecing together a damning portrait of a society whose structural racism leaves no one untouched.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGillian\u2019s work very much plays into the notion of the \u2018Concerned Photographer,\u2019 which was Cornell Capa\u2019s phrase for photographers who are looking, not merely to document the world, but to change it,\u201d says Maya Benton, an independent curator who organized a major touring exhibition of the photographs in Southern Rites<\/em> and related documentation. (Further stops on the tour, which currently runs through 2024, include Asheville, Atlanta, and Rochester.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Through these years of forays into alien and contested territories, whenever she returned home, Laub was also busy photographing her large, extended family\u2014relaxing poolside or in gilded living rooms, at Thanksgiving feasts and at brises, in meetings with the planner for her own wedding or grabbing\u2014with perfectly manicured hands\u2014the chubby cheeks of grandchildren. The result is the new exhibit, based on Laub\u2019s profound and endearing new book, also called Family Matter<\/strong><\/span>s<\/em><\/a>, out this month from Aperture (written with the help of Alana Newhouse, Tablet\u2019s editor).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandfather was the reason I started photographing my family,\u201d Laub says, paging through Family Matters<\/em>, where Grandpa Irving, wearing zebra-striped swim trunks, with his shoulder-length white hair, gold chains, and classic Jewish paunch, proudly gazes back at us, watering can in hand, from the leafy confines of his beloved backyard garden in Westchester. \u201cPeople looking at him might think he was vain, but really he had no ego.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Gillian Laub, \u2018Chappaqua backyard,\u2019 2000, from \u2018Family Matters\u2019 (Aperture, 2021) \u00a9 GILLIAN LAUB<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

For Laub, photographs were a way of understanding her connection to her family, but also a way of working out her own place in this world of intense \u201ctoo-muchness,\u201d as she calls it in her book, a world of shiny surfaces and suburban super-abundance.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cWhen I was in my 20s, I was mortified by it,\u201d she says, recalling her student days at the School of the International Center for Photography, housed until 1999 in a red-brick mansion on East 94th Street. \u201cI thought, I\u2019m not just this privileged Jewish girl from New York, I\u2019m a real artist, and I\u2019m going to work twice as hard to prove that. So in the beginning, photographing my family was also my way of navigating my own identity crisis. And then,\u201d she adds with a smile, \u201cthey are just such fantastic <\/em>subjects, visually.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Kira Pollock, now the creative director of Vanity Fair,<\/em> was a photo editor at The New York Times Magazine<\/em> in 1999 when Laub\u2019s picture of her grandparents and great aunt and uncle, en route to a play or museum exhibition in Manhattan, the women dolled up in furs and jewels, appeared in the magazine\u2019s weekly \u201cWhat Were They Thinking\u201d column. (\u201cWe like the comforts,\u201d her grandmother had explained, when interviewed by the magazine.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThere was so much love in that picture, such a familiarity, and yet her family were characters, almost caricatures in it,\u201d says Pollock, who over the years has sent Laub to photograph everyone from transgender service people to Hollywood celebrities. \u201cGillian\u2019s portraits have a realness to them,\u201d she explains, \u201cbut the personality of the subject is always somehow heightened\u2014it\u2019s something she manages to draw out of them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Absurdist humor, tempered by empathy and a deep strain of melancholy, runs through many of these pictures, which can veer at times perilously close to caricature. I ask Laub if she worries that her photographs might inadvertently reinforce antisemitic stereotypes of wealthy Jews who occupy too much space and airtime.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cIt\u2019s my biggest fear,\u201d Laub admits. \u201cBut I celebrate these people unabashedly. So if someone is looking at the photographs in a way that is antisemitic, it\u2019s because they are bringing their own prejudices to them. But then I go back and forth, wondering, how do I fit in here? Because I\u2019m one of them, so I guess I\u2019m vulgar, too.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

That \u201cback-and-forth\u201d became particularly acute during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, when Laub\u2019s parents, sister, and brother-in-law, who had previously always voted for mainstream Democratic and Republican candidates, became enthralled with Donald Trump\u2019s populist rhetoric. Suddenly the bitter, painful divisions that Laub had witnessed and worked to overcome in her work in Israel and the American South were threatening to tear apart her own family.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cThe way I get through things is by photographing them, and making work about them,\u201d Laub said. \u201cSo I had all this material, but I didn\u2019t know what I would do with it.\u201d Then in January 2017, she was approached by the organizers of Pop-Up Magazine\u2014a live storytelling venue which Laub describes as \u201clike a combination of the Moth and a Ted Talk, but multimedia and on steroids.\u201d The organizers asked if she had any family stories to share. \u201cI said, \u2018It\u2019s NOT a good time with my family right now,\u201d Laub recalls. \u201cBut they dug and dug.\u201d In June 2017 she travelled with Pop-Up on tour to six different cities, performing the material that she eventually incorporated into her book.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cIt was very cathartic for me,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it was amazing how many people, all across the country, came up to me afterward and said, the same thing is going on in my family. There was a real community out there of people who were struggling with this [same thing].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The pandemic intervened, and mortality\u2014a constant theme throughout Laub\u2019s work\u2014took center stage. A touching photograph shows her parents having driven to the Long Island home where Laub and her husband and their two young girls were quarantined on Laub\u2019s birthday\u2014the older couple stand, masked, on the other side of a glass door, holding a birthday cake and balloons. Who does that? Who wouldn\u2019t want these people as family members?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Family love is meant to be unconditional\u2014and yet, how many conditions do we in truth impose upon it, or upon the friends we love, insisting on like-mindedness, on the upkeep of strict borders, on lines that cannot be crossed? What are the unwritten codes and expectations that gird our deepest relations? To put it another way, what are the limits of unconditional love? It\u2019s a mark of just how divisive our society has become that it feels radical even to ask these questions. But maybe, Laub suggests, we should be broader-minded than that.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cHere\u2019s the thing\u2014I don\u2019t agree with my parents,\u201d Laub says. (It should be noted, as well, that in the wake of the Jan. 6 uprising in the Capitol, her parents\u2019 political views have changed.) \u201cI think [their support of Trump was] bonkers. But what I hoped to show with this project is that you can\u2019t just write everyone off. These days you are either among the righteous or the terribly evil ones. Well, people are more complicated than that, there is so much gray in people\u2019s lives, so much in-between.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Rereading her book, I was struck by how it deals not just with politics, but with the transience of life. \u201cI think I always knew, inherently, that everything changes, and that life is about loss,\u201d Laub said. \u201cThat\u2019s why the camera has been such a perfect tool for me, to help me process those realities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Leslie Camh<\/strong>i\u2019s first-person essays and writings on art, photography, film, design, fashion, and women\u2019s lives, have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue Magazine<\/strong>, and many other publications. Her translation from the French of Violaine Huisman\u2019s award-winning debut novel, The Book of Mother<\/a>,<\/strong><\/span> was published this month by Scribner. She\u2019s on Twitter @CamhiLeslie and on Instagram @drlesliecamhi.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Family Matters LESLIE CAMHI Gillian Laub, \u2018Grandpa helping Grandma out,\u2019 1999, from \u2018Family Matters\u2019 (Aperture, 2021)\u00a9 GILLIAN LAUB Gillian Laub\u2019s new book of photos takes an incisive look at her colorful, loving Jewish family, their politics, and the hard questions in between. Just days before the opening of \u201cFamily Matters,\u201d Gillian Laub\u2019s solo exhibition at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90397"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90397"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90501,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90397\/revisions\/90501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}