WHITNEY BIENNIAL EXHIBITION CATALOGUE, 2002~Larry Rinder

JULIE MOOS

Recalling the ethnographic work if the photographer Irving Penn, Julie Moos removes her subjects from their “natural” environment and places them in front of a neutral backdrop. Photographed frontally and almost always in pairs, Moos’s sitters are presented directly and objectively. Yet, while they are completely held within the camera’s gaze, her subjects are hardly powerless: they look back at the camera and at us with expressions that range from suspicious to serene.

Each of Moos’s recent portrait series explores a specific socio-cultural milieu. Friends and Enemies, for example, was shot entirely at the Altamont School, a private school in Birmingham, Alabama. Inspired by the recent tragic shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, Moos decided to photograph the students of the class of 2000 in pairs, based on powerful bonds of friendship and enmity that she discovered over the course of several months spent analyzing the school’s yearbooks and interviewing guidance counselors, teachers, and the students themselves. The students did not know with whom they would be paired until the moment their portraits were to be taken. Nor are we, the viewers, ever informed whether the couples we see are the best of friends or sworn enemies.

A more recent series, Domestic, similarly involves pairs of subjects, in this case wealthy Birmingham residents and their housekeepers. As in Friends and Enemies, the subjects of this series are not identified. Perhaps as compelling as the implicit divisions of race and class that these works convey is their most powerful evocation of character and personality. For Moos herself, “These photographs are about relationships and about the personal bond between employer and employee.”