A new series of intimate scenes composed in the tradition of great seventeenth century Dutch painting by the American photographer.
Like seventeenth century Dutch painters who made otherwise ordinary interior scenes appear charged with meaning, Jessica Todd Harper looks for the worth in everyday moments. The characters in her imagery are the people around her—friends, herself, family—but it is not so much they who are important as the way in which they are organized and lit. A woman helping her child practice the piano is not a particularly sacred moment but as in a Vermeer painting, the way the composition and lighting influence the content suggests that perhaps it is.
This collection of photographs presented in Harper's third monograph makes use of what is right in front of the artist, what is here, a place that many of us came to contemplate especially during the pandemic. Beauty, goodness and truth can reveal themselves in daily life, much like in Kant's notion of the Sublime or simply in the Dutch paintings of everyday domestic scenes that are somehow lit up with purport. Our unexamined or even boring surroundings can sometimes be illuminating.
Jessica Todd Harper (born 1975 in Pennsylvania) is an American photographer. She spent much of her childhood wandering around museums with a sketchbook, copying paintings. This traditional artistic preparation took an unexpected course when she started making photographs as a teenager, but the familiar canvases of her childhood heroes—John Singer Sargent, Whistler, Vermeer—still have their influences today: she is interested in making intimate, psychological portraits, where environment plays a large role. Jessica Todd Harper uses portraiture to explore the subtle tensions within daily family interactions and the complexity of human relationships. Her work is grounded in art historical tradition, but with a psychological undercurrent that marks its modernity.
A silver medalist in the Prix de la Photographie in Paris (2014), she was an Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition prizewinner (2016) and selected that same year for the Taylor Wessing Portrait competition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She has taught at the International Center of Photography and Swarthmore College.
