CBCA is proud to present On the Cusp of Something, a solo exhibition featuring the photographs of Sarah Benham. Best known for her impressionistic paintings, Benham applies a similarly hands-on, painterly approach to capturing her black and white photographs. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Benham would carry her Hasselblad 500c around her family’s home capturing moments – both spontaneous and staged – of family and friends. The collection of these photos is both intensely intimate and unexpectedly distant.
CBCA is proud to present On the Cusp of Something, a solo exhibition featuring the photographs of Sarah Benham. Best known for her impressionistic paintings, Benham applies a similarly hands-on, painterly approach to capturing her black and white photographs. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Benham would carry her Hasselblad 500c around her family’s home capturing moments – both spontaneous and staged – of family and friends. The collection of these photos is both intensely intimate and unexpectedly distant.
Benham’s painterly sensibility is on full display in her photography. Similarly to her painting process, Benham became absorbed in the deliberate, physical process of manual photography. Placing great emphasis on composition, she describes herself as a purist and prioritizes meticulous composition and natural spontaneity over image manipulation. The results are striking.
This body of work predominantly features Benham’s teenage daughter and her daughter’s friends hanging around the family pool, enjoying a bright summer day. Each in their early or late teens, Benham’s subjects appear very much on the cusp of something. By capturing her subjects in such a way that challenges or subverts our expectations of the lightheartedness of childhood with the seriousness of adulthood, each photo expresses complicated dualities such as sensuality and restraint, or innocence and maturity. Instead of playing and splashing as we might expect from a group of kids left to their own devises, images such as James South Dartmouth 1981 (1981) and Lyerly, South Dartmouth 1980 (1980) arrest the viewer’s gaze with the subject’s solid, knowing stare. Contrary to our anticipations of levity these images convey their young subjects with a seriousness and depth seemingly beyond their years. The warmth of images such as Marigny and Pam, South Dartmouth 1980 (1980) and Lyerly and Susie, South Dartmouth, 1981 (1981) invite the viewer into the familiarity of a sun-soaked summer afternoon spent among childhood friends. However, there is also a distancing quality to the images; an intimacy and familiarity among the subjects that keep us, the voyeurs, at bay.
