Book of the Week: Selected by Meggan Gould

Book Review Structure Photographs by Isabelle Boccon-Gibod Reviewed by Meggan Gould "There is a child shooting daggers at me. Much like my youngest, whenever I try to take her picture. I have no more than opened this new book, and I am clearly being glared at. Proceed with warning. Perhaps this child is irritable at having been placed on the floor, kneeling between their mother’s legs (presumed mother) while their siblings (presumed siblings) are able to show off their pretty tights and shoes, standing flanking the mother. The father (presumed father) hovers above them all, glowering at me as well. Not to be callous, but their clear animosity hooks me..."

Structure. 

By Isabelle Boccon-Gibod

Structure
Photographs by Isabelle Boccon-Gibod

Editions Hemeria, Paris, France, 2021. 88 pp., 9¾x12x½".

There is a child shooting daggers at me. Much like my youngest, whenever I try to take her picture. I have no more than opened this new book, and I am clearly being glared at. Proceed with warning. Perhaps this child is irritable at having been placed on the floor, kneeling between their mother’s legs (presumed mother) while their siblings (presumed siblings) are able to show off their pretty tights and shoes, standing flanking the mother. The father (presumed father) hovers above them all, glowering at me as well. Not to be callous, but their clear animosity hooks me.

Isabelle Boccon-Gibod poses 31 groups in this deliciously sterile, and lusciously printed book, Structures. In each, a family unit (presumed) sits or stands, using chairs or stools as necessary to fit within the formal rectangular space, and stares back out at us. A white background sweep is rolled neatly behind the subjects; the gray floor is meticulous. Faced with minimum visual stimuli, I fall headlong into the unique trance of the photographic typology.

I should note: I have always had a weak spot for a good typology. Deadpan redundancy is one of those hooks that pierces me, holds me, swings me from image to image. To limit the potential elements of complexity by controlling the variables within a group of images renders an insistent directing of our gaze. Typologies tickle my brain in the same pleasure center as jigsaw puzzles.

Putting human subjects at ease in front of a camera, conversely, gives me as much pleasure as having ants crawling inside my underwear. Perhaps I project discomfort (of artist and sitter both) onto portraiture. And yet — awkwardness is an underrated hook, and Boccon-Gibod plays off of it beautifully. Several subjects might be about to catapult off of their stools or chairs, barely able to hold a jittery knee still. In one, a younger woman looks as if she is about to lift the chair in front of her, holding her mother (presumed) aloft. Is it a gesture of love? Preservation? I imagine the difficult acts of posing at stake here — brooding teenagers, young adults just finding comfort in their skin, older adults adept at holding the camera’s gaze. Children practice what will later become instinctual — how to slacken facial muscles, a poker-faced response to the world’s amusements and slights.

It doesn’t take me long to begin to question the veracity of these as family units. Wait, do these people even know one another? I am excruciatingly aware of my typecasting assumptions as I flip from page to page, glib in my presumptions of familial bonds. Another confession of my puzzle-inclined brain: I long to be tricked. I think of Richard Renaldi’s Touching Strangers series, and I want to question the ties that link the subjects on each page. Might they be actors? Is DNA really the primary conceit for these groupings? The artist gives us no names, ages, relationships, no handy key to decipher family lineages. In not indulging this desire, we are (dangerously, delightfully) left to our own devices. A sociologist of French culture might note the relative homogeneity of the family groupings (presumed), the apparent dearth of queer families (presumed), the minimal racial diversity of the subjects (presumed).

I speculate at length on the logistics of making this work. I wonder, idly, who chose the stools and chairs for each pose. What does Boccon-Gibod say to these families (presumed), to invite them to participate, and then to direct them? How did she ask them to dress? The attire is neither formal nor informal — some in jeans, some in jackets, there is little notable about their clothes or shoes beyond that they seem strikingly, plainly, passively, nice. There are no visible rips, or holes, no legible labels, no words, branding, or slogans.

Afloat in anonymity and the clout of my own assumptions, I squint and flip through the pages, moving beyond the hyper-focused detail of facial expressions, fingernails, and shoelaces to the geometric forms of the bodies in the rectangular space provided. Each family unit of 2 to 6 individuals stiffly forms a structural presence — a triangle, a square, a rectangle. Ad-hoc buildings, units of cohesion. The redundancy of image structure belies the complexities of family structures, of course, and can only hint at the range of potential iterations. I hover, still squinting, in this space of pure architectural form, family bonds as arbitrary cement. However imagined, reductive, awkward... herein we find structures of strength.

I find myself imagining my own tediously heteronormative family as a page in this book. My partner and older child are obnoxiously good at deadpan posing; younger child and myself: squirmers (and scowlers). Or, myself as a teenager, with my original nuclear family (identical structure). I wish I had that photo — neat, clean, mythical. One moment where we simply stand together, neutralized to black-and-white, and stare forward, reduced to the ways our bodies touch at the shoulders, subtly bolstering one another.

These portraits are executed with exquisite attention to technical detail. The white backdrop’s rectangular frame, just a shade darker than the white frame of the page, holds the photographic frame, and is beautifully even, identical on each page. This is what makes typologies zing. The reproduction of the grayscale is nothing short of delectable. The photographs are introduced by a warm and spare essay by Daniel Mendelsohn, reflecting on the nature of, and need for, family (presumed) photographs.

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Meggan Gould is an artist living and working outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,, the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, and Speos (Paris Photographic Institute), where she finally began her studies in photography. She received an MFA in photography from the University of Massachusetts — Dartmouth. She recently wrote a book, Sorry, No Pictures, about her own relationship to photography.