Vincent Goutal by Chris Killip

01/12/1995

In this country there is a device, disigned for the home, which will help you to become a more passive consumer. Every home has at least one of these devices, often more, as they house the dominant medium for information and entertainment. In effect, it is your "given" window on the world. Or, more correctly, on the rest of the U.S.A., as here the world is not really on TV.

The localized daily shock of last night's TV and its tally of the deaths, murders, car crashes and fatal fires, just numbs. The national news is, in its scale, often beyond comprehension with senseless violence inflicted daily. On this continent the tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, the "natural disasters", bring an enormity of inconsolable grief. TV in America acts as a sort of reminder that outside of the small, personalized things that are yours, your immediate family, your domesticity, you have no control.

Vincent Goutal, whom when he was in America, I mistakenly thought of as " an innocent abroad", knocked on unknown doors and asked the question. "can I photograph you while you watch TV?". The open and unguarded said yes and the results are unexpected in the personalized complexities that they reveal.

In these photographs the TV is an icon, a companion, a participant, an audiance, our reflection, a magnet, an alienating device, an escape, a caretaker, a comforter, a wonder to be shared. In its ubiquitous familiarity it has also become an oracle, enabling Vincent Goutal to show us something of that unspoken, peculiar, supposedly non-existent incomprehensible thing called society in America. Here we have Americans shown to us as members of, participants in, and voyeurs of their own America society.

Chris Killip is the chairman of the Department of Visual Art at Harvard University

Killip has published three major books of his photographs: Isle of Man 1980; In Flagrante 1995 with texts by John Berger; and 55 2001 with text by Gerry Badger. His works have been exhibited in museums throughout Europe, Australia, and the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford; the Manchester City Art Gallery; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Landesbildstelle, Stuttgart; and IVAM, Valencia, Spain. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film; the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.