Towards the end of Donald Barthelme's Story "The School," the narrator, an elementary schoolteacher whose class has experienced an inordinate amount of death (everything from trees they've planted to pet snakes to fellow classmates) demand, in comically adult, metaphysical language, that their teacher provide some comforting answers, and, as the above quote suggests, he lamely suggests that they shouldn't be frightened, though he is often frightened.
This kind of duplicity is everywhere in contemporary America. As a country, we face death and decline on a grand, though for most of us abstract, scale. Fear mingles with double speak, and, in a profoundly anti-modernist turn, we love and celebrate our fear by turning away from the future, turning instead to the optimism of an America we experience in old movies, old objects and old clothes.
Ann Ploeger's photographs are, in this sense, deeply contemporary. They incorporate highly artificial elements of 19th Century portraiture. Their subjects, for the most part photographed in their homes and apartments, seem like actors on sets, surrounded by props which include their spouses, pets, cocktail glasses, mixing bowls, rotten bananas and garden hoses.
These objects and people, with their ironically bright and exceedingly shiny antiqueness, are treated as models for exploring Ploeger's own distanced interest in the domestic. How is it, she asks, do people do this? A couple posed on the side of a bathtub, with bodies wrapped in towels, look balefully at the camera. Is this what you want us to do? they seem to ask, one holding shaving cream, the other a razor. They aren't uncomfortable, don't look like they've been caught unaware. This isn't intimacy, because the pair are completely focused on the camera, and not on one another.
A private, emotional fear is at the center of Ploeger's project. A fear amplified by the photographer's insistence on iciness. The objects, in their high contrast and detail, and the people, with their consistently frank and flattened expressions, are merely elements in the photographs, parts of the set. This flatness makes these people intelligible to the artist. No pretense toward empathy, naturalism or effusion that isn't implicit in the objects and people themselves is bothered with.
Their courage is to maintain curiosity without succumbing to the need for an "assertion of value." Domestic bliss, as a value, is a cipher, and the emotions that such bliss entails are hot colors and flat expressions. Essentials, colors and shapes, with some people.

Statement by Jared Stanley

contact: ann@annploeger.com