The intimate life examines personal lives and domestic scenes in contemporary art photography. It approaches the common family snapshot and every-day scene from a formal art influence. These acts and gestures are not things that are normally captured with exceptional skill or care, despite our desire to covet them. Even though these family images are not perfect due to blurriness, red-eye or various other imperfections, they are still precious to us because of the presence of loved ones in the scene. This chapter features artists who intentionally utilize the common mistakes present in informal non-art photography to communicate that sense of privacy to the viewer. They use casual image taking to their advantage, promoting the feeling of intimacy they have with what they are capturing.
Intimate photography may imitate some of the images we capture in family snapshots, rights of passage such as wedding days, birthdays, or teaching children how to complete daily tasks. Art photography tends to venture much farther into the exploration of human relationships and behaviors. It will capture the darker side of life, in illness and sadness, and it will capture the completely mundane events of daily life, such as taking a phone call or sleeping. Intimate art photography tends to push the psycho-emotional aspects present in an image. They tend to be evocative and emotionally charged.
Photographers who shoot in this manner use their personal lives as inspiration for their work. Who they know and what surrounds them greatly influences what they capture. Their interests, obsessions, addictions, sexualities, fears, fetishes and curiosities are pursued and captured in two dimensions. Looking at these images is like looking right into the heart of the artist and seeing parts of them that are intensely private and unknowable outside of their work.
Elinor Carucci is an excellent example of a contemporary art photographer whose work is greatly influenced by intimacy, fetish, secrecy, the taboo, sexuality and sensuality, and imperfection. Her work is staggering in its close examination of its subjects. It magnifies humanity, analyzing details some may overlook or take for granted, such as chipped nail polish on the ends of her mother’s fingertips, the moist corner of a pair of lush lips, zipper imprints on skin from sleeping on a jacket naked, the subtle blue veins at the underside of a wrist.
Her work is sensual and provocative in its invasiveness. She explores beauty and aspects of humanity that are considered beautiful and not beautiful at the same time. A partial image of a young girls’ face paired with her shaved and razor-burned armpit, a woman crimping her mascara-rich eyelashes, ever on the quest for beauty and perfection. It seems to be a theme in her work, the examination of all of the hideous acts we perform on ourselves in the quest for perfection and beauty. From the plucking of hair from a nipple, and the application of products and hair curlers to the ritual of shaving and dressing. The way in which she presents these behaviors in her work gives the viewer a sense that she questions the necessity of these acts.
Her images capture the physical closeness versus the emotional closeness of relationships. Some of her images depict a complete emotional vacancy despite the current physical closeness of her subjects. They appear detached from each other and the situation and appear even bored. In other situations one person is reaching out and offering that physical and emotional comfort. There is a recurring theme of the emotional and the unemotional person; there is rarely a mutual emotional connection present in her photographs.
Elinor invites us to be voyeurs, and to stare unashamedly into scenes of daily life, things both familiar and mundane, as well as things that go unnoticed or kept locked behind doors and sheaths of fabric.
Raina Matar has done a series of formal work traveling the world and photographing young girls in their rooms. “This project is about teenage girls and young women at a transitional time of their lives, alone in the privacy of their own personal space and surroundings: their bedroom, a womb within the outside world.”
This is a very interesting body of work because it illustrates the relationship that people have between their psyche and their surroundings. Peoples’ rooms are often a reflection and an extension of themselves, this study observes this phenomenon through a wide range of girls from all over the world.
It is interesting how this work expanded over time, starting out as the observation of her own daughter going through the transformation from girl to woman. Seeing that carefree attitude of her child be replaced with the self-consciousness of adolescence, and spread outward into her environment was a fascinating experience for her. Her interest then turned to her daughter’s friends, then girls in other states, then spread even further to other countries. No matter where she was in the world, girls used their rooms as a form of self-expression, a personalized safe-haven from anything and everything. 
Raina has also taken many candid images of her own children. These shots are whimsical and carefree, much like their subjects they exude life and playfulness that only a child can possess. It is impossible to look at these images and not feel that youthful energy, it is infectious and at the same time bittersweet.
The spontaneous joy of childhood, however brief, is captured in this work. The photographs are framed like snapshots, but they are taken with great care and execution.
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Yijun ‘Pixy’ Liao is a Chinese contemporary photographer who photographs herself and her boyfriend, using the camera as a means of experimenting with the questions and frustrations she has with gender roles and how they influence relationships. Her series, ‘experimental relationship’ illustrates the personal issues she has with the expectations that have been put on her as a woman, as relates to how she is to behave when interacting with a man. As time has passed her ideals of what it means to be a woman and her prior expectations of what a relationship would be for her has changed. She met a man 5 years younger than her, and in this experience, she has found that she is the protector and the leader.
Yijun is questioning the stereotype of a male-female relationship and is switching both the sex roles and roles of power in this body of work. Her frustration with relationships and illusive true love, and the feeling of isolation and disconnection fuels her work.
The provocative nature of this image is heightened by the knowledge that the photographer is present in her own work. This is an unusual but powerful means of self-expression. Most photographers prefer to stay behind the camera, rather than to shove themselves into the line of fire. There is a stiff and almost comical edge to this image that gives it a life and personality of its own. It is if they are complete strangers, stripped down and forced into a romantic act. The male remains submissive as the female sucks fervently on his lower lip. This work does not suggest love or romance but the pursuit of physical satisfaction.
All of these artists are excellent examples of intimate life photographers, from the examination of human imperfection and emotional connection and disconnection, to the candid photography of children, and posed women in their rooms, to the questioning of gender roles in male-female relationships. They immerse themselves in what is important to them and through that, create an amazing body of work that is ever expanding and changing as they grow older and experience new things, and meet new people. This work is the consummation of the impermanence of life and the people who seek to photograph it.
