Home and Other Stories - Hardcover

Photographer Catherine Wagner presents details found in several American homes in triptych format, allowing three views from each home to tell something about the occupants. Just what is told is very much open to the viewer's interpretation. In her nearly impenetrable essay, Conkelton seems finally to make this point, that it is the viewer who "tells the story." (In exemplification, novelist Anne Lamott provides her own lively and sympathetic readings.) For her part, Wagner continues the cool documentary style, deriving from Walker Evans, that was dubbed "new topographics" in the 1970s. Her clinically clean, well-lighted black-and-white photos betray not a scintilla of expressiveness, yet in the choice of details and the juxtaposition of the three images in any triptych, Wagner directs the viewer toward particular meanings. Those generally arise from personal memories and associations, for the project is not large enough for the pictures to suggest sociological facts--nor indeed does that seem to be Wagner's intent. Gretchen Garner