“Sometimes, I’m so interested in what’s going on with people in their homes that I want to know what’s in the closet or under the bed. In my photographs I aspire to tell the viewer not just about what can be seen, but also about things that are hidden and locked away.
In 1997 I began photographing in the suburbs of Silicon Valley, where I had lived for many years. The idea for this may have come from looking at the work of August Sander, but also of Diane Arbus. To understand my surroundings I needed something like the systematic purpose of a catalogue, but a flexible one that would allow me to capture elements of the weirdness and sheer delight that seemed to exist everywhere completely unnoticed. Commenting on my surroundings, however, has never been a goal. What has mattered the most is my ability to photograph from the inside of this world, intimately, to erase barriers to discovery. While my subject matter is not unique, I think of myself as different from other photographers who have done similar work in that I don’t fear an intimacy with my subjects will blunt my critical faculties. It is more interesting and challenging if both I and the viewer are deeply implicated in the moments I try to record. It is where both photographer and viewer might feel most compromised that discovery becomes possible, that unexpected archetypes might arise.
My original project provided me with a working method which I realized could succeed in other places, so I expanded my catalogue to include middle and upper-middle class subjects in France and Spain. Some work has been done at the invitation of foreign institutions, and some was self-initiated. I’m fascinated by how, in an era of increasing globalization, one can travel very far into the secrets of distant people’s lives only to arrive at home. For this reason, I see my work as a continuum even if it was made in widely different places.
Because I’m fascinated with the relation between people and their places and things, I’m naturally drawn to the documentary. But my purpose has always been to make images that are arresting and can stand on their own, like paintings. I want the viewer to be surprised by instants of sudden recognition, to experience “Aha!” moments. By inviting the viewer into my game, I would like change the way she sees the world.” Edwards Beth Yarnelle.
“It was only a few years ago that Beth Yarnelle Edwards described her work as a catalogue of the dreams of Silicon Valley’s middle class. When completed, it was to be a gallery of suburban archetypes achieved by the simple empirical method of photographing as many different subjects in this area – the high tech capital of the world — as possible. Her way of shooting pictures was to work with people in their domestic surroundings in an often lengthy process to build deliberately posed, if sometimes casual-seeming color images that caught their subjects in odd, revealing moments. This straightforward procedure, however, would only be half the story. On the other side of the lens was a photographer with her own very quirky history of art, one that embraced equally old master painting and recent performance art, that might include a Degas pastel as easily as the acts of a former porn star turned performance artist. And so an image of teenage girls preparing to troll for boys might evoke a Renaissance painting or a portrait of a boy listening to his Walkman might visually claim descent from Watteau’s Gilles or Cezanne’s famous The Bather at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What then has Edwards, the artist-ethnographer of California suburbs, been doing in the Canaries, a cluster of islands off the coast of North Africa and belonging to Spain whose principal business is tourism? To all appearances, much the same thing….
…Whenever Edwards completes a cycle of images, the results usually fall along a spectrum defined by the documentary at one end and the visionary at the other. This is not to say that she’s a documentary photographer in any normal sense of the word. This range is like that between the novel of society at one end and more overtly allegorical or poetic fictions at the other.
…It is possible to enumerate some of the qualities that animate Edwards’ work. There is first the delicately negotiated intimacy with her subjects, her sensitivity to social archetypes, her impulse to parody, her delight in staging little dramas, her ability to be enraptured by something as mundane as the color of a bedspread. Then there is the alternation between her desire to record and her inability to resist sudden flights of fancy, and the way she occasionally swoops in from a respectful distance to impose a transforming vision. If one were to list her influences one would have to include a wildly varied list including a wide array of old master painters, particularly sharp-eyed observers like Velazquez and Manet, along with photographers like August Sander, Diane Arbus, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, and even the mystic Ralph Eugene Meatyard…
…Edwards has approached the psychological landscape, with an eye for people’s writing of themselves. In short, it is about seeing and reacting rather than saying. And that is fine, since for her to “say” anything directly in her photographs would be beside the point. What she has done is to take the tour, look through the glass of her own sensibility at the places and people to which her guides took her and made pictures from the incongruities, archetypes, mild hallucinations and dreams they contained. The great thing about this kaleidoscope of changing emotional tints is that it is also portable and can be ours — a handy lens we can carry away with us once the covers of the magazine are shut or the exhibition closes. And that is what one should expect, no more and no less.” Robert Evren © 2006
http://www.bethyarnelleedwards.com/
