People (in Pictures)

Wijnanda Deroo, Adler Hotel, Green Room, Sharon Springs, 2005

Is it better to have people in your pictures, or not? I guess that’s kind of a dumb question. For me, anyway, the best pictures are those that have something human in them. The best pictures are those that are human. But human doesn’t necessarily mean people.


Wijnanda Deroo, Columbia Hotel, Sharon Springs, 2005

Wijnanda Deroo, for example, photographs empty rooms, rooms without people, but rooms from which the people have not been gone for long. In the best of them, that absence becomes emotional content. And the pictures are beautiful. Beyond the obvious beauty of their color and light, they are sensuous, tactile, and complete in themselves. If a little cold, in the way pictures without people sometimes are.


Bert Teunissen, Castelnau #1, 1996

But if you think they might be better with people in them, you should have a look at Bert Teunissen’s Domestic Interiors. (They’re hard to avoid these days, anyway.) I don't know what's wrong with me, but I can’t seem to get behind Teunissen’s pictures. And the reason, I think, is the people in them.


Bert Teunissen, Blackwaterfoot #120, 2006

There’s something weirdly unrealized about Teunissen’s people. It’s not that their presence in the pictures is casual or accidental - the rooms in which they appear are their own - but they’re not the real subject, either. Teunissen’s real subject is the place, or a concept of the past that is supported by the place. And that confusion infects the pictures themselves. They’d be better without the people.