Expo : Portrait of a marriage - Deborah Smith

30/11-21/12/2007
Opening Friday 30 November at 17h30

One photo a day, day after day for 365 days, from one wedding anniversary to the next, Deborah Smith's project Portrait of a Marriage can be read as a diary on the one hand, a series of questions investigating boundaries for portraiture on the other.

I saw a man, half naked at times, often wearing a blank expression on his face; a boy jumping happily in the garden, the summer warmth; a woman and her camera, silent. Objects, the house, and the city. Rich in colour, but the presentation did not trigger much dialogue in me, at times I found it hard to engage in this almost generic auto-biography format.

It has to be personal and it also has to speak to others. I felt this negotiation through the depiction of objects, sites, changes of focus and perspectives. I also felt that this project could have been operated by a few different people, perhaps at a particular time on a particular day, she decided to see this marriage in a complete different way. .. No, I am not reading this right. But did she demand any deeper reading? There was hardly intimacy in the horizontal bands of pictures.

And I wondered, did she only take one photo a day, or she selected one from the hundreds a day?

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Frances Hodgkins
http://www.teara.govt.nz/1966/H/HodgkinsFrances/HodgkinsFrances/en
http://www.johnleechgallery.co.nz/artists/featured/franceshodgkins/

Joan Didion
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4956088