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E. Horsfield. Well Street. East London. March, 1988
Artist
Craigie Horsfield
(English, born 1949)
Date1993
MediumBlack and white photograph
DimensionsFramed: 100 x 131 1/4 in. (254 x 333.38 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase made possible by a grant from The Burnett Foundation
Object number1995.2
Status
Not on viewCopyright© 2020 Craigie Horsfield / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Category
Label TextCraigie Horsfield’s work foregrounds relations: between the artist and his subject, self and other, individuals and society at large, the present and the passage of time. E. Horsfield. Well Street. East London. March, 1988, 1993, an enormous photographic portrait of the artist’s wife in the couple’s home, brings these relationships literally to the foreground. The sitter’s reclining head, shoulders, and arm nearly fill Horsfield’s image, which is so closely cropped that her setting in bed partially draped by a sheet hardly registers. Printed at a mural-sized eight feet tall, the work is both intimate and disarming. The oversized woman looms, seemingly inches away from the viewer, but she is also far away, absorbed in her own thoughts, an occupant of an unspecified, black-and-white place and time distant from our own.
Perhaps only after reckoning with the woman do we notice the hand that reaches into the picture at the lower left to wrap around her arm. We might presume that it is the hand of Horsfield himself, reaching out to touch his wife as he looked through the lens of the camera held steady in his other hand. His wife does not acknowledge the touch, however, or return the photographer’s gaze.
Horsfield typically produces only a single, unique large-format print of each image, opting not to exploit the reproducible nature of the photographic negative in order to emphasize instead the unrepeatable specificity of the instant captured in each frame. Alongside international contemporaries such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall, Horsfield’s work helped to secure photography’s status at the forefront of contemporary art practice in the 1980s and 1990s.
Perhaps only after reckoning with the woman do we notice the hand that reaches into the picture at the lower left to wrap around her arm. We might presume that it is the hand of Horsfield himself, reaching out to touch his wife as he looked through the lens of the camera held steady in his other hand. His wife does not acknowledge the touch, however, or return the photographer’s gaze.
Horsfield typically produces only a single, unique large-format print of each image, opting not to exploit the reproducible nature of the photographic negative in order to emphasize instead the unrepeatable specificity of the instant captured in each frame. Alongside international contemporaries such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall, Horsfield’s work helped to secure photography’s status at the forefront of contemporary art practice in the 1980s and 1990s.