Carlos and Jason Sanchez re-create domestic spaces in minute detail, being careful to camouflage all traces of their staging. This concern recalls a cinematic mode of production, which creates realistic places, situations, and actions. Like Jeff Wall, the Sanchez brothers use photography to fix re-created situations, which then refer metonymically to a narrative of some kind. For their work The Gatherer (2004), they reproduced in studio the overflowing apartment of an old man who, his whole life, had amassed innumerable useless objects—pictures, books, clothes, figurines, newspapers, and so on—assembled in an order whose coherence he alone could explain. This man, probably driven by a compulsion to accumulate, the image seems to tell us, felt constrained to collect all sorts of things in the event that they might prove useful someday.
By making us forget the illusionistic methods at work in the production of this space, the Sanchez brothers skilfully direct our attention to the psychology of the person they are depicting. A careful and minute examination of this image, and of John (2002) and 8 Years Old (2003), brings out details that heighten its narrative power. Here is a method similar to literary narrative, in which detailed descriptions of living spaces are often used to fix, as in an image, the personalities of the people living in them.
|
