Annie Claflin
By George Slade

As I write this, on a rainy and suddenly cool Tuesday in late August, summer seems to have packed and left town. This is the first inkling I’ve had, since May, of a winter to come. Annie Claflin’s photographs of her family, while taken in summery and beach-sandy sites in Maine, California, and Florida, have a sense of summer about to leave the stage, of warmth (both thermal and emotional varieties) that is tenuous at best.

Claflin uses photography as a means of exploring relationships between herself and her family. She struggles, as so many do, with finding the best way to represent those closest to you, in the places that speak the family’s familiar stories. Interiors of family houses often refer us to spaces outside, even opening doors to allow us egress. Her portraits of family members also seem to refer outside the frame, or so far within it that the photographs often seem as though they’ve been made without the subject’s knowledge. This image of Tiff and Jim catches the couple profoundly distracted from each other, only the merest hint of connectedness despite their being together with skin on skin.

Tiff and Jim on a Lounger, Biddeford Pool, ME, 2007

Claflin often poses people with eyes turned away, or closed. Darkness, like the shadow that absorbs Tiff here, is both metaphor and subject matter. While the photograph withholds as much as it tells (who can say what is the truth of this picture?), the pictorial moment that Annie Claflin has preserved here gives me a strong sense of imminent seasonal change. Makes the goose bumps rise on my arms and neck. Makes me think about a sweatshirt. Makes me wonder if Tiff needs one, too.

To see more of Annie's work, visit her website here.

Once the NEO feature is redesigned and running, those portfolios will replace the Member Spotlight. Until then, members are encouraged to email information about exhibitions, book releases, and other current events for consideration in the Spotlight. Please send to: info@prcboston.org.