The Shared Diaries of Different Families. Corinne Day and Ryan McGinley

Abstract

The paper focuses on the evolution of the diaristic photography in the decades at the turn of the millennium, thus parallel to the progressive democratisation of the photographic act and the widespread diffusion of the practice of compulsive image-sharing on the web. The driving force behind this evolution is represented by a vast group of authors who, between the 1990s and the early 2000s, exhibited on the gallery and museum walls or published on the pages of niche magazines (which became alternative exhibition channels), multiple photographic series inspired by the idea of in-progress narration of private life. Among the exponents of this group are Corinne Day and Ryan McGinley, who are to be considered the link between two generations: on the one hand, the one led by Nan Goldin with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which is, by her admission, nothing more than a "public diary", and on the other hand, the "new diarists", who are bringing the original traits of this research trend into dialogue with social changes and the opportunities offered by new technologies in the field of amateur photography. In this perspective, on the one hand, they are normalising both the idea of the 'public diary' dedicated to the post-familiar and counter-cultural communities to which, like Goldin, they belong, and the propensity to borrow from common practice, along with the ungrammatical style of the snapshots kept in family albums, exhibition methods as well as social uses and functions; on the other hand, they anticipate the times insofar as they take to extremes, even in the absence of a smartphone equipped with a camera, the obsessive and compulsive use of the medium as part of an exercise in identity construction and the writing of the mythology of the self.