These are very beautiful photographs from Donigan Cumming’s very rare photobook The Stage (1991), unearthed by LightBox’s Eugene Reznik. There’s something off about them.
Cumming — a Montreal-based installation artist, photographer, experimental documentary filmmaker, etc. — left the US for Canada in the ’70s in opposition to the Vietnam War, and he hated photojournalism.
He spelled out why, over the phone with LightBox:
There’s a mythology of concerned photography that revolves around improving things for humans, stopping war and doing all kinds of things that are G-O-O-D. At the same time, the people that make this are usually driven by another set of motives, and some of them are not very transparent, and pretty self-absorbed.
So he started approaching people in the street and going to their house to take portraits, among their strange possessions, infiltrating their intimate curiosity, presenting them as they are — dishelved, pleased, eager — in all their uncomfortable glory, sometimes literally with pants around their ankles, decidedly without the pretense of humanitarianism. “He decided he would adopt the documentary mode in order to expose its fracture points,” Reznik writes. This is photojournalism after all, isn’t it?
(Images: Donigan Cumming via LightBox)
