Essay by Brian Paul Clamp
"What we see on television pointedly influences the formation of our identities." By Brian Paul Clamp, ClampArt NYC The ubiquity of the television set renders it nearly invisible to most eyes. Despite the fact that the TV is often the focal point of the main room in any home, we tend to look beyond the mechanism itself straight into the images it projects. Artist Susan Lakin recently took interest in the television sets owned by a variety of her friends and acquaintances. But rather than simply documenting the electronic appliances, she devised a method in which to capture portraits of the owners reflected in the glass screens of the inactive sets. Combining a photograph of the television with its owner(s) and the room in which the device is watched, Lakin gleans a wealth of information. In order to render clear reflections on the TV screens, Lakin filled her subjects’ homes with artificial light, careful not to lose the appearance of the homes’ natural illumination. From a tripod placed in front of the set, Lakin shoots two photographs of the television—one of the TV in the room and a second focused on the reflection in the screen showing her human subjects. She later combines the two images by seamlessly placing the image of the reflection onto the set (removing any evidence of the tripod and camera caught in the glass of the screen). At first glance Lakin’s photographs strike one as strange in the sense that her subjects are so happy and complacent to be framed by a device as relentless as the “boob tube.” Often staged and arranged as if shot in a common department store photography studio, her subjects grin and pose stiffly, apparently unaware or uncaring that they are literally and metaphorically being defined by the media. However, by accepting the artist and her equipment into their homes, I suspect these people are in on the joke. And this humour is also a part of the power of these images. As is now widely recognized, what we see on television pointedly influences the formation of our identities. Lakin’s photographs represent a truer version of “reality TV.” Perhaps by placing genuine human subjects on the screens of television sets rather than actors playing imaginary roles, the artist is attempting to derail the tyranny of mass-media representations. The pictures also successfully blur the line between public and private space, and illustrate that the media often takes powerful control of territories we might falsely imagine as safe, such as our own homes. Of course, Lakin’s photographs are not the first to take as their subject the television and its influence on contemporary culture. One obvious precedent is Lee Friedlander’s series from the 1960s – The Little Screens – in which Lakin observes: “His images are devoid of the human presence other than the broadcast on the screen. . .” Lakin’s Television Portraits, on the other hand, embrace the human presence reminding us who is really impacted by the power of these now not-so little screens.