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Doug DuBois

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Doug DuBois (born 1960, Dearborn, MI) is an American photographer[1] based in Syracuse, New York.

The bulk of DuBois' photography is portraiture, and he is well known for photographs of intimate familial scenes.[2] He is among a group of contemporary American photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, and Tina Barney, whose re-imagined depictions of domestic spaces anticipated the transformations of family life among a "tidal wave of late-capitalist individualism and aspiration."[3]

DuBois is a recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, and his work is in the collections of MoMA in New York, SFMOMA in San Francisco, LACMA and the Getty in Los Angeles, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.[4] He is an associate professor and department chair of Art Photography at the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University.[5]

Life and work

DuBois grew up in the suburban New Jersey community of Far Hills.[6] As a teenager he began taking photographs with a rangefinder camera he found in his father's closet. He has a younger sister Lise and a younger brother, the composer Luke Dubois[7], who appear often in his early photographs.[8]

Dubois graduated from Hampshire College with a Bachelor of Arts if Film and Photography and subsequently received a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute.[9]

In between his undergraduate and graduate educations, his father suffered a near-fatal fall from a commuter train and spent several years convalescing in the home,[10] and Dubois documented this process as a "kind of emotional protection."[6] These family portraits formed the basis of a body of work surrounding his family that would continue for twenty-four years and eventually come to be published by Aperture as a photo-book titled All the Days and Nights.[11] The photographs in this series document his changing family: his father's recovery from his injuries juxtaposed with the descent of his wife, his sole caretaker, into the depths of depression and mental illness, the dissolution of their marriage, as well as the maturation of his brother and sister.[8]

Dubois's interest in the family, both his and others, is also evident in a subsequent photo series, "Avella," which chronicles life in the deindustrialized coal-mining town of Avella, Pennsylvania, where his father grew up.[6] To learn about his family's hometown Dubois would drive his grandmother around in his aunt's car while she identified local landmarks and told stories, often taking pictures as they traveled.[2] He documents the decay and blight of the town[12], but also the families which live among such an environment of insularity and lack of opportunity.[8] The photographs challenge American "myths" surrounding upward economic mobility and question how American families survive amid economic uncertainty.[2]

The themes of economic uncertainty and provincial life are likewise central to Dubois' recent photo series, which was published as the book My Last Day at Seventeen. These photographs depict working class teenagers in a housing estate in Cobh, County Cork, Ireland after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy as a result of the 2008 financial crisis.[13] The series represents the anxiety inherent to the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and how the subjects' anxiety regarding the future is mirrored by their economic uncertainty.[14][15] Shot over five summers, the series presents an "endless summer" in which precarious teenagers perform identities informed by an international popular visual culture but mediated through a local context.[13]

Dubois does not take a snapshot approach to photography instead carefully composing his compositions with supplementary lighting, and using either a medium format camera or a large format folding camera with a cloak.[11][12] He does not consider his work to be documentary, rather he views each photo as a collaborative endeavor between artist and subject which is based in truth.[16][14] Dubois will often stage or recreate photographs, sometimes even alluding to visual works which are not his own, and has borrowed the literary term "creative nonfiction" to describe his work.[17]

Publications by DuBois

  • All the Days and Nights. New york: Aperture, 2009. ISBN 978-1597110983.
  • My Last Day at Seventeen. New York: Aperture, 2015. ISBN 978-1597113137.

References

  1. ^ Hirsch, Robert; Erf, Greg (CON) (2010-12-28). Exploring Color Photography: From Film to Pixels. Focal Press. pp. 72–. ISBN 978-0-240-81335-6. Retrieved 29 June 2011.
  2. ^ a b c Collins, Gillie (2016-04-11). "Doug DuBois and the Photography of Family". Guernica. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  3. ^ Knelman, Sara (Spring 2020). "Domestic Comfort". Aperture. 238: 106–111 – via EBSCOhost.
  4. ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Douglas DuBois". Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  5. ^ "Doug DuBois". College of Visual and Performing Arts. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  6. ^ a b c Gotthardt, Alexxa (2016-03-25). "Doug DuBois's Portraits Capture the Intimacy of Aging and the American Family". Artsy. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  7. ^ Sheets, Hilarie M. (2014-01-09). "Portraits From Clips and Bytes". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  8. ^ a b c Asokan, Ratik (2016-04-22). "Doug DuBois's Beautiful Photos of Youth, Age, and His Parents' Failing Marriage". Vice. Retrieved 2020-04-14.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. ^ "Doug DuBois - 20 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy". www.artsy.net. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  10. ^ Asokan, Doug DuBois, Words by Ratik (2016-04-21). "Doug DuBois's Beautiful Photos of Youth, Age, and His Parents' Failing Marriage". Vice. Retrieved 2020-04-14.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  11. ^ a b Mahoney, John (November–December 2013). "Intimate Portraits". American Photo. 24: 60–69 – via EBSCOhost.
  12. ^ a b Ryder, Katie. "History, Time, Trauma: The Photography of Doug DuBois". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  13. ^ a b McBride, Stephanie (2016). "At Seventeen". Irish Arts Review. 33: 100–103 – via EBSCOhost.
  14. ^ a b "From Ireland, Photographer Doug DuBois's Images of Fading Youth". Hyperallergic. 2015-11-07. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  15. ^ Griggs, Tom (Spring 2015). "The End of Youth: Doug DuBois's My Last Day at Seventeen". Exposure. 48: 26–33.
  16. ^ Davies, Lucy (July 2015). "Teenage Truths". Journal of the Royal Photographic Society. 155: 528–531 – via EBSCOhost.
  17. ^ McCauley, Adam. "The Lingering Light of Childhood: Doug DuBois' Ireland". Time. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
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