Lot 14: DOUG DUBOIS (B. 1960)

DOUG DUBOIS (B. 1960)
My Grandmother (sign "please use back door"), 1990
chromogenic print, printed 2001
signed, titled and dated in ink (on the verso)
22 5/8 x 15¼in. (57.5 x 38.8cm.)

J. Paul Getty Museum, Where We Live: Photographs of America from the Berman Collection at the Getty Center, October 24, 2006- February 25, 2007

Doug Dubois takes an intimate, personal look at his own family life as evidenced in this portrait of his grandmother on the front porch. We see a similarity to other well known bodies of work like Philip-Lorca diCorcia's A Storybook Life(2003), a project from which the subject's were drawn from the artist's life, but in a different twist to Dubois, diCorcia's subjects were instructed to act out a narrative rather than be themselves in their home environment. Both artists offer only suggestions to the meaning of the images.

Dubois describes his work:
"In my most intimate photographs there is a detachment that speaks of my isolation. I no longer see my family as an assured source of comfort but as part of the confusion of my adult life. In the conflict between intimacy and detachment, I feel the loss of my childhood family." (Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, The Museum of Modern Art, 1991, p. 22)