Every Single One of Them

Book excerpt: "In the interstices between film and photography, ad stereotypes and clichés of a Californian paradise, Jack Pierson (born 1960) produces pictures that are deliberately sensual and sentimental. Through a subtle hybridization of genres they raise the central question of autobiographical sincerity as the work's theme and site. By arresting intimate moments, they compose a familiar, private world, happy and nostalgic. By disclosing (or pretending to disclose) something of the artist, they acquire a natural quality that turns them into secret confessions. We are simultaneously in the artist's studio and in the middle of his life, and, I'd be tempted to add, in the idealizing and loving grace of his gaze." --Henry-Claude Cousseau