Limited-Edition Photograph by Tierney Gearon

Aperture Foundation is pleased to present this limited-edition photograph by American artist, Tierney Gearon as featured in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture, 2011), edited by Kathy Ryan. Gearon’s work is primarily a documentation of her close and extended family; her children on holidays, the homes of relatives across the United States, “snapshots of everyday life”, but she also works as a commercial and editorial photographer for publications including W, The New York Times, and Vogue.

Gearon notes the following about the experience of shooting the famed actress: “A lot of actors don’t like having their photos taken. When Diane Keaton arrived at my house for this shoot she was wearing a hat. As soon as we began, she took the hat off and started hiding behind it. I think she was surprised that I said: ‘Okay, then, if you want to hide your face let’s just do it all the way instead of this peek-a-boo thing.’ I asked her to lie on the ground in this alley and put her hat over her face.”

This photograph is from “Another Woman, ” published in The New York Times Magazine on October 23, 2005. Gearon insists, at least in regard to her personal projects, that she does not manipulate the images or her sitters. In this image however, despite that perhaps the location, make-up, lights, and assistants have all been pre-arranged, there is a fleeting moment of strangeness which Gearon has managed to capture, making the figure of Keaton simply another element in an interesting picture. Like most of her other works, there is a strong sense of narrative in this image, but the viewer is left uncertain as to what that narrative exactly is.

TIERNEY GEARON was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1963. She is a self-taught artist who began her career on the other side of the lens as a model, later becoming a fashion photographer herself. While she still works in a commercial and editorial capacity, over the past decade Gearon has been increasingly focused on personal projects such as The Mother Project which showed at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York in 2006, and her latest series explosure for Phillips de Pury & Company in 2008. Her work began to gain recognition in the art world after being included in the Saatchi Gallery’s I Am a Camera exhibition in 2001. She currently lives and works in Santa Monica, California.

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