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Weathering Time. By Nancy Floyd.
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Photographs by Nancy Floyd
GOST Books, London, UK 2020. 257 pp., 7½x10¼".
Meet Nancy Floyd. Every day since 1982 — when she was just 25, a recent college graduate — she has taken a portrait of herself. I know what you’re thinking. Everyone takes selfies, welcome to the club. But Floyd’s project is distinct from the duck lipped, phone-tilted headshots flooding social media. She seems less driven by narcissism than typological obsession. Think Bechers, not Kim Kardashian.
Floyd’s long-term self-portrait series covers impressive range, history, and a disconcertingly frank degree of self-exposure. Its entirety is beyond the scope of any single book, but her new monograph from GOST takes an honest stab at it. The thick purple tome includes roughly 1,000 of the 2,500 photos in the project. Its title, Weathering Time, is a good summation of Floyd’s interaction with her camera over the course of four decades.
The book begins on day one, 23 November 1956. Floyd’s birthdate is the only text on the cover. The interior photographs commence with two prefacing shots from that very day, capturing the newly born Nancy Floyd in her hospital crib, followed by a quick snapshot from 1958. Then a short series documenting Floyd’s childhood home and family at scattered points between 1960 and 1998. Watching the house exterior fall into disrepair over decades, the phrase “weathering time” seems applicable. If the title page doesn’t quite cement it in the mind, the initial self-portrait series will. Underwear shows Floyd in her skivvies over the course of 16 pictures shot between 1982 and 2020. In each photo Floyd stares back impassively, shutter cable clutched in one hand. Pictures of women in underwear have long been associated with the male gaze, glamour, and sexiness. Perish the thought. Floyd’s initial series blunts any such impulse with quotidian functionality.
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Underwear is the perfect leadoff series, setting the tone for all to come with its absurdist chapter title and direct, honest recording. In the pages to come she takes a turn as a laundry worker, daughter, wife, friend, niece, ex-girlfriend, pet owner, and more. We see her in shorts, trousers, dresses, good hair, interesting hair, engaged in various hobbies and professions, on the phone, in the darkroom, watching tv, vacuuming. Each series is carefully organized into its own thematic chapter, sometimes with a text intro. Sample headings hint at the bewildering variety: Birthdays, Carpentry, Holders, Success, PJ’s, Craigs… Elements, tasks, and people come and go. The only constant is Floyd, centered quietly within each vertical frame. Slowly but surely they form a mental image of her presence in the reader’s mind. What must she be like? Surely patient and determined, for starters. To treat her daily visage with the calm indifference of someone brushing their teeth or making eggs for breakfast, well, that’s dedication.
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A long term project like this generates a lot of material, just by its nature. Wrangling all of it into book form is a challenge. Weathering Time takes a mass-volume approach, packing up to nine gridded photographs into every single page. Small captions are added along the margins. This strategy allows the book to cover a ton of territory, but perhaps some depth has been sacrificed for the sake of breadth. Even with excellent resolution and reproduction values, a 3-inch tall photo has its limits. It’s hard to probe too deeply into individual details or tonal subtleties. But for the purpose of the book — geared more as project survey than hi-res exhibition — it seems an acceptable tradeoff.
As for sequencing, GOST must have been tempted to order the work chronologically, in the order it was made. This has been the display approach of other daily self-portraitists such as Noah Kalina, Karl Baden, and Tehching Hsieh. The decision to organize into themed chapters was contrarian, but proved shrewd. Floyd photos have a natural playfulness that comes through in chaptered arrangements. One can study the course of people and objects over time. And of course, Floyd herself changes in ways that might be less obvious in a strict chronology.
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“You’re still a façade when you’re standing in front of the camera,” she told Dazed Digital, “but I’m not trying to make myself look better or prettier, all those things that come into play when we’re making photographs. Photography is so full of lies, it’s interesting to see pictures of people when they’re off guard.” Taken as a whole these off-beat moments form quite an extensive self-portrait, a long-term self-study on par with Rembrandt, Friedlander, or perhaps Vivian Maier. Floyd must have a finely tuned sense of her appearance by now, its minor tics, scars, and shifts. With the book, she’s bravely opened her persona to outsider scrutiny. It’s a bold step, to weather time in public. Few photographers could take the same leap.
As a photo professor at Georgia State University, Floyd had some financial independence to pursue Weathering Time on her own schedule and without outside pressure to monetize the work. The benefits of this approach are obvious, but the other side of the coin is that the project took a while to find its audience. Floyd has organized scattered exhibitions over the past decade or so, and the occasional online profile, even as more photos were being added to the series. These outlets have kept the project simmering. But what put it on full boil and launched the present book was the inaugural ICP/GOST First Photo Book Award, won by Floyd last year. GOST’s publication is a fitting capstone to the project, well worth seeking out for photographers interested in portraiture, typology, or self-analysis.
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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.