Part of Winter 1998
Donigan Cumming is already well-known for his photographic portraits which cunningly mix documentary technique with a playful staginess. Working for many years with a group of non-professional models, Cumming’s has built a large body of photographic works which restage and replay their supposedly documentary subjects and subjects’ worlds. A Prayer For Nettie, Cut the Parrot and After Brenda are a series of recent videos documenting his collaborations and interactions with his community of subjects. A Prayer For Nettie is an elegy for Nettie Harris, a recently deceased model and the subject of his most recent book of photographs, Pretty Ribbons. The video records a series of prayers and anecdotes given by people who knew or did not know Nettie. Cut the Parrot is “clearly the story of Albert’s death…it’s continual pretext is an extended wake.” After Brenda follows the tangled and twisted history of a failed relationship.
“I think these are very unusual documentaries, and I’d put that term in quotation marks. They’re meant to make you question what is real, to pose the question, ‘How much of what we see is biased by the person presenting it?’ In Cumming’s hands documentary has become, “rehearsed, tested, pushed and pulled,” and the human condition that he depicts is what he calls, “a sort of laboratory, a provisional site, composed of subjects, their circumstances, the mechanics of photography and that irresistible seducer, a little bit of truth.”
