A traditional understanding of documentary photography purports photography to be a democratic process from which truth and realism can be ascertained. Jennifer Mason blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction by engaging with photography as identity that can intersect the boundaries of reality. Roland Barthes argued that photography was a kind of index of “that which has been”. Mason’s images are highly composed and produced, suggesting a deeply subjective understanding of “what has probably been” or “what will probably be”.
Squarely confronting the role of the photographer, Mason gracefully intrudes on a world which is scarcely seen. Aware of Mason and her photograph her subjects drop their public façade and commence a voyeuristic journey through the inner workings of conservative suburban lives; deadpan expressions, alienation and depression. The photographer is aware of their emotional landscape and they are not. Or perhaps they have engaged so faithfully and trustfully in the identity of the photographer that they no longer feel driven to appear as something they are clearly not.
Not only does the cinematic quality of her work question the role of documentary factuality, but it directly addresses the people in question. It is an aesthetic which amplifies the lives of the very ordinary. It attributes her subjects with meaning and reason to investigate. Where normally, the subjects would be dismissed as uninteresting or lifeless, the ominous lighting in which she depicts them, opens up and encourages realisation of an array of subtle complexities in character. Mason is concerned with the psychological. Her movement towards digital manipulation is a further step towards penetrating the psyche of the particular human she investigates. Rather than working within the confines of a domestic interior, Mason has turned her attention towards the limitless capacity of the mind.
Mason sees her subjects as ordinary to the point of idiosyncratic. Her characters are synonymous with what they would themselves perceive as the most psychologically tormented individuals. In After Dinner a family watches television – physically close, yet wholly removed from one another. We think of family portrait, a portrait where the awkwardness, unhappiness and anguish is not protected by a happy façade. Mason draws on personal experiences which operate between the threshold of public and private. She reminds us of our own privately painful experiences of ordinary events and suggests that they have meaning beyond the four walls of the domestic interior.
Jerome Webby 2009