Photography Collection

Has Jessica Todd Harper been inspired by Elinor Carucci when she took the photos for her book Interior Exposure? Family portraits seem to be an important subject for both photographers but Elinor Carucci is focusing more on the naked body, on details of the persons she is taking photos of toenails, scars and the eyes. For both photographers the relationships between the members of their families are important as a subject of art. Elinor Carucci focuses more on intimacy and Jessica Todd Harper seems to be more inspired by the history of family portraits in art. In some pictures the persons of the motif appear like statues, it remembers of a painting by Renoir.
As Jessica Todd Harper was a child her mother took her and her sister to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. And as a teenager Jessica spent rainy weekends copying impressionist paintings with charcoal and pastel. "I was obsessed with the Impressionists", she says. So painting seems to be one of her sources for the family portraits, an other is story telling. "My family is very interested in history and storytelling. I have been photographing them since I was 15 and I think at that point it just seemed natural (rather than premeditated) to tell stories with pictures. It was what I was used to anyway. And family stories were always of particular interest."

For some of the photographs the houses they were taken in are like stages and the persons seem to play a role in a drama of a middle-class family, some of the pictures express a strong intimacy like the self portraits with her husband Chistopher and some seem to be pictures of a dream. Jessica Todd Harper has studied art history at the Bryn Mayr College and photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Afterwards she has worked as the assistant and studio manager of Larry Fink. Nowadays she is an assistant professor at Swarthmore College and a well known photographer. Institutions like the George Eastman House, Rochester or the Houston Museum of Fine Arts are exhibiting her photographs.