Photography has two faces: art and document. Sometimes these work together. Ansel Adams’ Farm Workers and Mt. Williamson (1943) is both a vision of the working agricultural landscape rendered by the artist and a document of Japanese-American internment at Manzanar concentration camp. Adams’ composition is formal and his subject is historical. Stephen Schaub's 2005 "Haiku Series" show fiercely poetic compositions that move further and further away from representation. In Four Leaves, the sky and foliage in the background disintegrate into an intense, chaotic tempest of yellows, blues, and sharp blacks. The petal-like leaves on the stem in the foreground give the viewer emotional ballast and the illuminated leaves in the top right corner convey a sense of beatific hope. The piece balances the disorder of nature with a poetic symbol that allows the viewer to find peace and harmony in the disruption around them. "The photographs choose an emotional over a literal translation of a scene," said Schaub. "An interpretation of a scene emerges which may in fact be only distantly related to the original scene." In contrast, Luke Powell’s “Afghan Folio” is an ethnographic study of pre-Soviet-invasion Afghanistan. The images, while beautiful, document the people and the land: how they dress, where they live. The Slingshot, for example, shows a young boy in traditional dress sitting with a slingshot around his neck. The photographer may have asked the boy to pose for him, but he did not dress him or give him a slingshot. The idea of this boy came from Afghanistan, not from Powell’s imagination.

Ciaran Brennan makes art photography: “For most people, a picture… captures something that happened; it is a record. My pictures are a creation of the imagination, not something that happened,” he said. He stages and choreographs the world around him, takes multiple shots, reworks images, and produces photographs that embody the ideas he is trying to express. He is not alone. Brennan’s methods are similar to Cindy Sherman’s in her self-portraits as B-movie or film noir actresses or Sally Mann in her portraits of her own children.

Brennan’s milieu is North American suburbia and particularly its people and its architecture. By referencing these Age of Reason paintings, Brennan’s photographs engage in a dialogue between the origins of modern politics, science, economics, and art and the contemporary, diluted state of those principles: how we have changed, how we have stayed the same.

The Piano Lesson is part of Brennan’s “Re-enactments: The Age of Reason” series in which he draws inspiration from the paintings of the 17th and 18th century. The photograph is direct a reference to Johannes Vermeer’s 1661 painting Girl Interrupted at Her Music. In Vermeer’s painting, a young woman sits at a table by a window. She looks at the viewer while her music teacher continues his lesson. A chair with a cushion invites the viewer to join her. In Brennan’s photograph, the boy sits at a piano in front of a window. A couch is in view on the right. The music teacher is focused on the lesson, but the boy is looking at the viewer with an expression similar to the woman in Vermeer’s painting. Elementally and compositionally, the two works of art are the same. The mandolin and pitcher of wine on the table, the portrait of cupid in the background, reinforces the socio-sexual nature of the scene in Vermeer’s painting, but Brennan’s photograph is stripped of innuendo. The relationship between the boy and his teacher is strictly professional. The telling portrait of cupid is replaced by a modern abstract print. The excitement of being caught in a potentially romantic tryst is replaced in Brennan’s photograph by the potential diversion from the ordinary or tedious the viewer’s interruption offers. Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music is an intimate peek into the life of 17th century Hollanders; Brennan’s The Piano Lesson, is an equally powerful look at 21st century suburbanites.

In the “Re-enactments: Fantasies” series, Brennan uses his memories of his own childhood and observations of his children to explore the aspirations and fears of children. The Temple, for example, shows two boys kneeling before a shelf lined with LEGO® Bionicles, plastic toys based on a mythological world inhabited predominantly by biomechanical beings engaged in a pseudo-mystical warrior culture. The image is a direct reference to the Sumerian army in The Standard of Ur (2700 BC). By kneeling before their altar, two boys are engaged in a worship-like practice; postulants in a church based loosely on the marketing mythologies foisted on them.

Any artist working with images of suburbia is at risk of falling into the trap of their subjects becoming caricatures, nostalgia-riddled posers of a lost American dream. Thirty-five years ago, photographer Bill Owens published Suburbia and since then has extensively pursued the subject. He focuses on how people spend their time (Tupperware parties, for example), the places in which that time is spent (garishly decorated homes), and their possessions (BBQs, boats, and knick-knacks). Other photographers have since tackled the subject and in doing so, explore such topics as suburban manifestation of consumer culture (Brian Ulrich) or nostalgic fantasy (Anthony Goicolea). Photographs of suburbia tend to invite social commentary. Of the people in his photographs, one review described the people in Owens’ photographs as “a naïve generation, content to live in the suburbs and seemingly unaware of the world on an international level.”

Bill Owens’ method of approaching his subject was no different than his antecedent Walker Evans, whose subjects included southern poverty, Depression-era farming families, and daily life in pre-revolution Cuba. Evans’ subjects and photographs are often lauded for their authenticity and veracity. In contrast, and through no fault of his own, Owens’ suburbanites face accusations of being shallow, fake, and moral failures: “The people in Bill Owens’s photographs are tacky, almost all of them, and tackiest when they have aspirations. This sets them up for ridicule — for being sneered at. But ‘tacky’ is an aesthetic and not a moral category: A person may wear polyester and yet be noble, generous, brave, and even smart. I don’t think Mr. Owens is interested in the spiritual consequences of his subjects’ cultural limitations.” (William Meyers, “The Shame of the Suburbs,” The New York Sun, August 11, 2005)

Brennan’s photographs avoid the suburban conundrum because they are not documents of the suburbs. His suburbia is not the home to bouffant-sporting, middle-class slack-jaws. His milieu is authentic, free of nostalgia, matter of fact. The carpet and drywall of late-twentieth century development architecture tells the viewer the setting is suburban. The objects are mass produced, recognizable by brand and familiarity. The clothes are typical. What makes these photographs work is that suburbia is not their subject, but the theater in which the subjects play out ancient dramas: pledging loyalty and allegiance (God and Country), performing acts of idolization (Adoration), reaping the harvest (The Return from the Supermarket); and dreaming of the future (1969). In short, the photographs are art.

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