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Donigan Cumming is a photographer and video artist whose startling treatments of the old, the indigent, the ill and the addicted challenge the taboos of representation. Cumming created the photo exhibitions “Pretty Ribbons” and “Harry’s Diary,” which have shown internationally. His video work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art’s New Documentaries series, at the New York Video Festival, and at the 1998 Rotterdam Film Festival. "I
work with a group of people in Montreal that I got to know over the
course of a long photographic project called Reality And Motive In Documentary
Photography. For that project, I used about 250 models, few of them
professional. Eventually I was working almost exclusively with one person,
Nettie Harris, who became the central figure in a book called Pretty
Ribbons. Nettie and I worked together until her death at age 81. I made
the first tape as a kind of elegy, returning to interview people who
had figured in earlier work. Some had never met Nettie at all. They
are real people, but because of our long association, they are prepared
to work on an improvisation or roughly rehearsed basis to make these
tapes. If something works, we are liable to do it again to see how it
flows or changes." “Overlooked
are the luckless, the infirm, and the borderline mad. They inhabit grim
residence hotels where poverty and disappointment are as predictable
as the peeling paint. Donigan Cumming travels the halls of these hotels,
not as a stranger or voyeur, but as cohort, sharing in the abject heroism
of everyday life. His fascinating videoworks are tales of woe and comedy
whose improvised style confounds the boundaries of drama and documentation.
Cumming prods, interrogates and cajoles his subjects, capturing their
tenacious dignity, creating a theater of the down-and-out.” "Gimlet Eye" is Donigan Cumming's most recent book, co-published in Cardiff by ffotogallery and Chapter to mark Cumming's solo exhibition of video installations and other multi-media work. The book is fully illustrated, including images from earlier series, such as Pretty Ribbons and Barber's Music, excerpts from tapes and installations, and a provocative essay by critic, Hugh Adams. |
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