Jeanette Spicer Sees What We Miss

The Quiet Intimacies of a Brilliant Artist.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEANETTE SPICER

TEXT BY TYLER AKERS

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Jeanette Spicer’s photographs are often sedulously staged in quiet, ordinary spaces. She waits for the moment when the light and shadow playfully pours over her subject’s face, body, furniture, or the area around them — their figure often blurred or obfuscated in a layered composition that rewards careful looking. Spicer’s most recent photo book, To The Ends of the Earth, features large-format images of her mother taken over a period of 12 years, often accompanied by the artist or her girlfriend.

While Spicer’s intention certainly isn’t to produce documentary photography, she takes an indexical approach in representing her subject’s bodies in her portraiture — she aims to show the distinctive imperfections of each subject’s skin, never photoshopping it to appear more smooth or clear.

As in the customary snapshot, Spicer’s pictures capture the immediacy of the moment they were shot, but they are also supercharged by her voyeuristic finesse — her use of elaborate, often tunnel or keyhole scenic constructions accented by temporal orchestrations of manipulated light. Her series of portraits is calmly explicit and cleanly sensual; it’s both an introspection and an homage.