Photo Exhibit Opens Door to Families’ Homes and Lives

A few years ago, San Francisco photographer Catherine Wagner was given 30 days to move from the home she had lived in for 10 years. “When you live in a home for 10 years and you’re forced to move, it brings up a lot about, ‘What is home?,’ ” she said.

During the search to find a new home, Wagner was “really struck by people’s representations of and the whole notion of home projected through objects, family pictures and furniture,” she said.

Her house-hunting experience motivated Wagner to photograph home interiors--not those of people who had spruced them up to sell them, but living spaces captured in their typical, everyday condition. From pictures she took in about 200 homes has come “Home and Other Stories,” an exhibit of 34 black-and-white triptychs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. These images bring viewers into the dwellings of a socioeconomically diverse group of people scattered around the United States.

“Obviously, everybody cleaned up to some degree, because the houses are by and large very neat, except for William F.’s,” she said, referring to one homeowner who had things piled everywhere.

Exhibit curator Sheryl Conkelton considers the series “an investigation of American domestic life. I see things in those images that we had at home when I was growing up, and they have all kinds of resonance for me. And at the same time I see things that I’ve never seen before. In the end, none of these things can be compared in a judgmental way. Ultimately it’s about recognizing that we all come from different places.”

“It’s not a document, a specific message,” Wagner said. “I’m not carrying a picket sign saying I want you to think like this about our contemporary culture through our homes. There are two facets to this whole project. I really see it as much more aligned to conceptualart than any other art movement. And I’m trying to get it to read both as ideas and as this very personal chord.”

Elements of “Home and Other Stories” are based on Wagner’s previous work, such as the photographs for her book, “American Classroom.” A teacher for 18 years, she is now an associate professor of art at Mills College in Oakland.

“The classroom is a model from contemporary culture. Prior to that, I worked with construction sites, which again are models that we all look at. We’re very familiar with all of these models that I’m using,” she said. “I’m trying to get you to re-see them. In a way, they’ve become invisible to you because you see them so much.”

Wagner photographed the homes of people she did not know “so that I didn’t have any preconceived ideas of who these people were, which would dictate what I was trying to do,” she said. She found volunteers through word of mouth during her travels to various cities. “They all said the same thing: ‘Sure, you can photograph here, but there’s nothing to see.’ They all were very open and trusting of me to come in. Nothing is constructed for the camera. The work is incredibly intimate in terms of the stories that are revealed.”

The one common denominator Wagner found in homes, whether in the North or the South, owned by rich or poor, was that people put up pictures of family and people close to them. In this category she included not only family snapshots but pictures of religious saints.

Using a large format camera--that “makes everything look hyper-realistic; I’m asking people to really look at what’s in front of the camera,” she said--Wagner shot three to 15 images in each home. None of the shots include the residents.

She chose to exhibit three photographs from each place to convey the sense of an open-ended narrative. This “story-boarding” of pictures “allows images to take on this more literary form,” she said.

It also gives viewers the opportunity to construct their own stories. The “Other Stories” of the show’s title “are made up by viewers based on their own projections,” she said.

Wagner is particularly pleased with the exhibit design, which lights up her works in a darkened room. “It makes the viewer become part of a piece because you’re not lost in the environment of the greater room. You’re right there with it,” she said.

“Home and Other Stories: Photographs by Catherine Wagner” is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays to Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Aug. 8 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5900 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Call (213) 857-6000.