Ghosts and Reflections: Richard Doherty on Impermanence

                                          Christopher Blay

In Richard Doherty’s photographs, passing reflections in storefront windows and poltergeists

that vibrate in the haze of long camera exposures share a state of flux. Reflections cast are

fleeting, and the seconds-long shutter speeds that end in a burst of flash are an inventory of

time, slowed down and briefly halted in a ball of light. The now-obsolete Type-55 Polaroid film

Doherty sometimes used, and even the City of Oak Cliff itself, the subject of a great part of his

body of work, both share the oscillation between the then and the now. Even when the subject

of his photograph is perfectly still, as in his architectural studies and his portraits, there is always

an element of the ephemeral. Moments are fleeting, and time is constantly moving away from

what is permanent in his images. Doherty’s long game of documenting the streets of Oak Cliff

bears out in images that weave the past and the present in a premonitive gesture that

states—everything changes and the photographer is present.

 

Ever the constant observer, Doherty is working in modes that would be familiar to his

predecessors, from Eugene Atget to Gordon Parks, to Garry Winnogrand, Robert Frank and Bill

Owens. This cohort of image makers and their devotion to long-form singular subjects not only

bring us as close to the “truth” as we can get with photography, but also to the heart of what the

image does best–giving us a lodestone to the moments, events, and spaces we encounter

every day. They also give us a nuanced perspective on our places and events, from the

monumental to the mundane.

 

Embracing the transient nature of things, Doherty’s photographs are a meditation on memory

and how images, since the inception of the photograph, construct and influence memory and

underline impermanence. My phone delivers occasional “memories” to me, which the Artificial

Intelligence microprocessors and programs assemble from the photographs stored in it. As

someone who experienced technologies that were once separate in function evolving into a

single device (a phone is not a camera, and a computer is not a phone), I can say that my

memories from the past are very different from the ones I make now, and even more so from

the ones my cell phone creates for me. Where once before I could reconstruct moments of time

in my head from actually being there or from an image or two in a photo album, I, like the rest of

us, have multiple images from each day forming or informing my memories, with very few filters

or edits to put them in context. Doherty’s catalog of images over the past 35-plus years does

just that, and coalesce our collective memories (in analog) into a portfolio that delivers a

microcosm of life in Oak Cliff, America in all its dualities.

 

Doherty makes no overt political propositions in his work, yet his photographs are

anthropological theses on life in Oak Cliff since the mid-eighties. In making his images year-in

and year-out, Doherty lays bare the lines of bifurcation between Oak Cliff and Dallas, “Progress”

and decline, gentrification and displacement. The excess of the eighties and the community in

the shadows of the big city are all there, literally in black and white. Our relationship with his

images change over time, even as they are sealed in time, unaltered by our gaze. Looking at

some of his photographs now, post - the events of the past thirty years, some of the shifts in

context can be subtle, but they are evident, the photographer’s intent notwithstanding.

 

His compositions, cinematic in gesture and form, mimic the frames on a roll of film, or the aspect

ratio of a theater release, telling multiple stories between the dividing lines of each loaded spool.

His work is a rejection of photography history in which images of non-white communities and

cultures were weaponized against them. Throughout that history, depictions of the “Noble

Savage and pseudosciences like Physiognomy in photographs armed colonizers and

capitalists with their justifications for white supremacy. Discarding that legacy, Doherty’s

proximity to his subjects, whether the people or the city, bears a reverence and sincere

deference. He is not impartial here. He loves Oak Cliff, and it shows. Photographing the neighborhoods in the city where he still lives, sometimes surreptitiously in thrift stores or on Jefferson Boulevard, he dances on the ever-present lines of demarcation between the past and the present, the static and the motion.  The photographs become part of their own past, and ours, as Doherty freezes the liminal space between architecture and time. His ghost-like compositions are all at once a memory and a manuscript of our existential condition. Impermanence made manifest.

 

Closer to home and more personal, Doherty’s durational portraits of his children Kate and Jack

are less Nicolas Nixon’s pictures of sisters taken over a forty-plus year span, and more Sally

Mann in their ever-present observational modes and intimacy. Documentary as a proposition for

truth and the real can have no stronger veracity than making images literally in your own

backyard. It is what, and who Doherty knows. There is tenderness and commitment in

these pictures, something that only reveals itself out of a years-long practice of waiting and

observing.

 

Richard Doherty’s photographs are a patient, long, hard look at the world around us and what

we see is a mirror reflection of ourselves. To quote New York Magazine’s Senior Art Critic Jerry

Saltz, “We never see a work of art as it is; we see it as we are.”

 

 

-Christopher Blay, January 2023