Donigan Cumming: The Mirror, The Hammer And The Stage

About the Exhibition

This exhibition includes one single image and three triptychs comprised of 30×44’” framed black-and-white photographs and an installation of 250 8×10” framed prints accompanied by a sound track that runs continuously.  The series is a theatrical model absorbed with the history and the applications of the social documentary tradition.  The issues addressed by the work include the mannered vocabulary of the genre, the myth of the single, decisive truth, and the hidden opportunism in abstracting from the misery of others.  These are critiqued by visual quotation and by loading into the photographs all the emotional symbolic hooks that have formed our diet of concerned photography.  The title The Mirror, The Hammer And The Stage is a conceit that claims three false idols for the work:  transparency, leadership and madness.  It Is a continuing body of work that follows an earlier series of three parts entitled Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography.