Tierney Gearon revisited

I was flipping through W magazine this morning before eating my Cheerios, and I saw that there was an article on the actress Dakota Fanning, who, I was surprised to learn, is now 14. I’m impressed by Fanning and others like her: actors who happen to be children, as opposed to child actors. It seems like they’ve found a loophole, a crack in the spacetime continuum or something—able to walk in the world of adults while remaining children, and enjoying all the benefits of both worlds. The article shows that well. So, too, does the photo by Tierney Gearon.

Copyright © Tierney Gearon

And that leads me to the real subject of this post. Gearon is, to my mind, the real deal. I first heard about her when the film Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project came out, and I saw the film and heard her speak at UCSB in February. The film primarily documents Gearon as she photographs her children and her manic-depressive, schizophrenic mother. There were aspects of it I loved, parts of it that I found frightening and disturbing, too. The Q&A afterward was awkward—a combination of Gearon’s own demeanor (she seemed a bit manic, all over the place, hard to follow) and the audience (a woman in front of me audibly said, “That’s disgusting!” two or three times during the film, and several people in the audience seemed not to get her photos of her children).

The more time has passed, though, the more my respect for Gearon has grown, and the more I recognize the beauty in her work. I think of her and the film and her photos often, and isn’t that what it’s all about? My sister Cara and I have talked about The Mother Project more than once—the complexities of photographing your family in that way, what it is to be a mother, our feelings about our own mother and ourselves as daughters. It’s powerful stuff. I think I’m going to go order the DVD and watch it again. I see connections between Gearon and The Wire that I’m still trying to sort out.

What Remains

I’ve had What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann in my Netflix queue since it came out a couple months ago, and it finally arrived this week. I watched it last night, and I think I might watch it again tonight and again tomorrow with S. when he’s over. It’s that good.

Mann was one of the first photographers whose work I fell in love with—particularly Immediate Family—and this film only deepens my admiration for her, as a photographer and a person. There’s so much in these 80 minutes to find inspiring, but here are the first couple minutes of the film, which are inspiration enough for now.



There is the temptation, I think, when you’re just starting out in something, to look for big ideas, big stories, big topics, because you think that if you find something important, your work will be important. But usually, the smaller and more personal you go, the more you pare things down to their essence, the more powerful they are.

Look for projects from me in the coming months that are more personal, less about the world outside my life and more about the world I inhabit. I’m planning to do a zine of one of them later in the summer. I’ll keep you posted.

Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project

Tonight at UCSB I saw Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project, a documentary about Tierney Gearon and her photographs of her mother and children, and heard a Q&A with Gearon afterward. I’d known of her work and was happy to have the chance to see her in person. The thing is, I don’t know what to make of her—not just based on the documentary but based on her Q&A, which was incredibly honest and yet tortuous, much like the film—and that’s affecting my perception of her work in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

Beautiful men

I’m catching up on movies this week, and tonight’s put me in a much better frame of mind than I was in when writing the last post. The movie: Venus (2006), starring Peter O’Toole. Is there a more beautiful actor on the planet? (I almost wrote “Is there a more beautiful man . . .” but I couldn’t get beyond “Is” before answering that: my boyfriend, of course, in every way, always.)

I’m not prone to shedding tears while watching movies, but when I do cry in movies—as in life—I sob, and I sobbed watching this one. Peter O’Toole reciting “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .” and that bloody girl being too young, too defensive, too blind to see it.

On the last post: The only answer I can come up with is to just work hard at the work I love, speak up, and be good to strangers and loved ones alike. What more is there?

I like Ike

I recently (finally) saw the documentary Why We Fight (2005).

I feel as though my entire sense of who we are as a nation has been altered. And it’s not as though I’ve been burying my head in the sand. I’ve believed for years that the Bush Administration is corrupt; but I’ve also believed that, as a people, Americans are basically good. Now, having seen that film, I have to wonder. In a democracy, how can you separate the people from the government? The corruption isn’t about political party, it’s everywhere, and our government is not “them,” it’s us.

Even the Bush Administration is us. Oh god, the horror.

You can see why, having realized this, I’ve been a bit quiet the past few days.

Yes, I vote. Yes, I sign petitions. Yes, I occasionally e-mail my elected representatives in Washington. But what exactly is the point of all this? What can I do to put an end to the military-industrial(-congressional) complex that Eisenhower warned us about more than a decade before I was born?

Powerless is how I’m feeling today. And if I feel powerless, sitting in the richest nation on Earth, imagine how the people whose countries we’re bombing the hell out of feel.

Salsipuedes Street

Random film recommendation: Jesus Camp. Just got this Oscar-nominated documentary from Netflix this week, and it’s pretty much left me speechless. At its most basic level, Jesus Camp is a brilliant documentary. But when Pastor Becky Fischer, one of the film’s main characters, said, “Some extreme liberals, they have to look at this and start shakin’ in their boots,” I was sure as hell shakin’ in my Uggs.

The second time around, I watched the DVD commentary by co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, and my respect for the two of them only grew. I’ve always been a fan of documentaries—for a while, I thought I wanted to be a documentary photographer—but I don’t know whether I could be fair and objective in my approach, especially when the message being communicated by the subjects of the project is so offensive to everything I believe in. I admire Ewing and Grady for their ability to do exactly that. They see the full picture of who their subjects are—and they let their curiosity win out over their politics.

It’s a stunning film, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball