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Article and Interview with Nancy Scherl, by Diana Nicholette Jeon
I was so pleased when Diana asked me if I’d like to be interviewed by her for Blue Mitchell’s One Twelve Magazine. I have read many of the articles and interviews that Diana has written through the years and am always impressed by her full understanding of the history of photography, as well as the various genres of photography. Her interview questions are thought provoking, and I found that I needed time to really think through the questions carefully.
Laura Pressley, Executive Director at the Center in Santa Fe, had written a beautiful and well researched foreword for my book, DINING ALONE In the Company of Solitude. In it she said “the images unfold in a cinema verité style, so the camera is used to unveil truths in a documentary approach.’ I loved that Laura wrote this and I also felt that she understood my work formally as well as conceptually. That said, when I had to respond to one of Diana Nicholette Jeon’s interview questions to me (who are you as an artist and what is your overarching vision for your work in general), I responded ‘I draw from pictorial and documentary genres in much of my work, notably when working on portraits, where I frequently invoke metaphor.’ I kept my answers short, to be respectful of the space of a layout.
Preceding Diana’s interview with me, she wrote: ‘Scherl classifies herself as a social documentarian, yet her style is cinéma vérité. There's something reminiscent of Philip-Lorca diCorcia in how I view Scherl's series. I find a similarity to diCorcia's Bruce and Ronnie 1982, in that Scherl, like diCorcia, works in the liminal space between documentary and choreographed construction. DiCorcia's scene may appear unposed, but diCorcia has arranged the people and props and strategically lit the room. Scherl also directs her sitters to look outside the frame and illuminates her settings. Can an environmentally-controlled, photographer-directed image indeed be a documentary one? Like the narratives of the uncertainties of human life and the partial truths that photography gives us, it's up to you as the viewer to decide. The story we garner from each image is the one we compose in our head and is part of what makes Scherl's book compelling. In the end, my viewpoint is that the work is social commentary.’
I am in agreement with Diana referring to DINING ALONE In the Company of Solitude work as social commentary, rather than social documentary. This series has a social documentary underlay but it is actually cinema verite’ and it falls in a middle ground drawing from Pictorial and Social Documentary genres. I consider my visual stories to be social documentary but my portrait series aren’t. The fact that I strive to capture truth within the context of that which is staged is fine but still, stylistically, the work is cinema verite’. I’m forever grateful to have a colleague who is adept and comfortable to critique another’s work, and also who is able to discern the fine lines between terminologies that are so important.
Feel free to read the full article and interview.