Capturing Time and Space in the Analyst's Office: An Interview with Photographer Shellburne Thurber

In a program at the Boston meeting titled “In-Depth: Art, Culture and Politics: Memory and Material Space: Analytic and Other Interiors in Photographs,” noted photographer Shellburne Thurber presented work from two of her series. Thurber has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including three one-person shows in New York City. The Fogg Museum, Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Polaroid Corporation are among the public collections holding her work. Her awards include the Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was artist-in-residence at the Boston Athenaeum from 1999 to 2002.

Morris L. Peltz, founder of the “In-Depth: Art, Culture and Politics” presentations, introduced the program. Daniel H. Jacobs chaired the morning panel. Discussants were Michael Belldoch, faculty member at the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York City, and Lia Gangitano, founder and director of Participant, Inc., an alternative, nonprofit art space in Manhattan. The two black-and-white photographs on this page, originally in color, were among those shown.

Michael Slevin conducted and edited the following email interview with Shellburne Thurber:

Q. When did you begin taking photographs?

A. I started to photograph seriously around the time that my mother died. I was 19 and had dropped out of college. I was living in Saratoga Springs in'a Sanford White-designed Victorian mansion that had been converted into a boarding house. I was living with an eclectic mix of people.

The bikers lived on the first floor; the jockeys from the track nearby lived on the second, the witches on the third, and the artists on the top floor I lived in a turret surrounded by stained glass. With this move to Saratoga, I had finally found a group of people that I felt comfortable with and I began photographing them. I'm sure that this need to record was given an extra edge by my mother's death. I suppose I had this sense that by photographing my life, the people and places that meant something to me, I could insure against their disappearance.

The interior work began when I started making pilgrimages out to southern Indiana to visit my mother's mother I never knew my mother well and our relationship had always been difficult. I was hoping that by visiting my grandmother and the place where my mother grew up, I would come to a better understanding of who she was. My grandmother lived alone in a Hopper-like Victorian farmhouse on the top of a small rise in the middle of a cornfield. At night, when she went to bed, I would skulk around looking for anything that could give me some sense of who my mother was, but my grandmother had cleared anything of any meaning out of the house. What I was left with was the house itself and I began to photograph it at night. When I got home and processed this work, I was stunned by how accurately these empty interiors spoke about my mother and her family and their life in this place.

Q. What prompted you to photograph analysts' offices?

A. I was visiting Buenos Aires with a close friend. We stayed with a friend of his who lives with his mother, who is an analyst. We happened to be down there during soccer season and there were two TV's in the house going almost constantly. When I got home from walking around, I would want to read but could never find a place quiet enough. Finally Gela suggested that I take my stack of books into her office. I was a little shy about it at first. It was as if there were some kind of force field over the entrance. Anyway, I went in, stretched out on the couch and started to read, but I got distracted almost immediately. As I looked around, I started to think about all the history it had witnessed—Gela's, her patients', and the difficult and sad history of the country itself. Every object seemed charged to me, every object felt like it was there for a reason.

I asked Gela if I could photograph it. She said, yes, and then asked me if I'd be interested in photographing some of her friends' offices. Before I knew it, she had lined up several offices for me to visit and I was off and running. I got a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard the following year and decided to spend that time photographing analytic offices in the Boston area. There are so many aspects to this project that fascinate me. These offices clearly belong to the analysts. The analysts choose them, decorate them, spend their working lives in them, surround themselves with objects that are often significant and meaningful. Yet, for the hour that the analysand is there, the space becomes his or hers.

Q. There are no people in your analysts' offices or your abandoned houses, but they have such a palpable psychological presence.

A. I agree, but I think that the sense of presence plays out in the two types of spaces in different ways. When I decided to photograph abandoned domestic dwellings, I was very much interested in how human energy plays out in spaces where the inhabitants are

no longer around. What I was surprised by, both during my time in these houses and once I got back home, was how much I had personally identified with these structures. I have often thought of constructed space as another kind of body, especially these domestic dwellings that have been witness to human drama and activity of all sorts. As a middle-aged woman, I found these spaces particularly poignant and easy to relate to—one middle-aged body to another older one, a body in decline. In some way I felt that by photographing these spaces, I was bearing witness and paying homage to lives that I knew nothing about and to the structures, the bodies that had housed them.

The analytic offices were very different. First of all, I was dealing with spaces that were still very much inhabited and inhabited by many, many people. And I was dealing with objects, and objects, like space, have a charge and strong presence of their own. So I felt that I was definitely dealing with a situation that allowed less room for my own projections. In some sense, I felt that I had come full circle to the first images that I made in my grandmother's house a few decades earlier.

Q. Tell me a little about light. Photography is about light It pulses in the analytic office and the window of the abandoned house.

A. Light has always been an important element in my interior work. I trace that to a series of images that I made around the death of my close friend and surrogate mother, Anna Stearns. When Anna died in the late 80's, I went into her home to make a record of it. Without thinking about it, I made one set of images before the furniture was removed and then went back in once the house was stripped to make another set. I was stunned to discover that the images of her house with all the furniture removed spoke more about her spirit than the furnished shots did. I think it had a lot to do with the way the light raked throughout these spaces. It felt like the light was a stand-in for her presence. She was an amazing person, so it made perfect sense to me that she would show herself in such a way.

Q. Roland Barthes wrote of the photograph, “Its testimony bears not on the object but on time.” Abandoned houses and psychoanalysis are both about time.

A. When I think about the abandoned homes, I definitely think about time, a time that is no longer. When I think about the analytic interiors, I think about the notion of time in a different way. There seems to be a way in which the process of analysis involves suspending time in the linear sense. The energy in the offices I photographed often manifested itself as a palpable sense of immediacy and anticipation, very different from what I experienced in the abandoned homes. Having said that, there is a way that time seems to stand still in these abandoned structures that feels similar to the kind of suspension of time that I talk about in the analytic offices.