Documentary and Metaphor: The Work of Karen Marshall
By Seth Thompson
Originally printed in the March/ April 2009 issue of Afterimage
Reflecting upon documentary photographer Karen Marshall’s work, one cannot help but think about Pieter Breughel’s 1565 painting The Harvesters, located in the European Paintings Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Needless to say, the comparison between Bruegel’s and Marshall’s work is not about “masterworks” but rather intent and context. Among the paintings of religious figures and aristocrats, Breughel’s painting is a seemingly simple and straightforward one—depicting average people going about their daily lives in the late summer months. Some are tending to crops as others are eating and drinking under the shade of a large tree and in the far distance one can make out children playing in the field. This seemingly simple caricature-like painting reveals a class of people often overlooked in the art of its time and place, much like the work of Marshall, which for more than thirty years has predominately captured the everyday life of middle-class America frequently overlooked in contemporary art. While other photographers such as Tina Barney and Sally Mann have addressed teenage adolescence, which is a predominant focus of Marshall’s work in this article, it is her long-term raw anthropological-like style that sets her work apart. …