excerpt from the  essay, Carly So Far,  Roni Feinstein 2006

CARLY TV

One day early in 1999, Bishop Good was casually taking

photographs of Carly in Carly’s Allentown, Pennsylvania, living

room. At the time, Bishop Good, who divides her time between

South Florida and New York City, was involved in creating an extended

series of paintings in which family photographs were layered below

and partially obscured by heavily pigmented surfaces. During this

particular photography session, a television was playing in the

background and Bishop Good snapped a picture just as Carly

turned her attention to a Viagra commercial that was being aired.

At that moment, recognizing the narrative and socially critical

potential of the image that had imprinted itself on her camera’s

lens, the “Carly TV Series” was born.

In each of the works of this series, Carly’s figure is shown within

the enclosed environment of her family’s living room juxtaposed

with the image of an enlarged head framed by the black rectangle

of the television set. The series began with intimately scaled works

in a pronounced horizontal format (12 x 18 inches) that were largely

black-and-white. Color in these works was used sparingly, evoking

additions made in old hand-tinted photographs; it was employed to

highlight the “televised” image and select aspects of the scene.

From the first of these images, where its appearance was mere

happenstance, Carly wears a bathing suit, the swimming costume

allowing the photographer to better reveal body language and to

avoid the distraction and specificity of clothes. It was both of

Carly’s own volition and at the photographer’s request that she

often appeared wearing a hat, mask or wig. Her furry little dog,

Petie, often served as a prop as well. As the series progressed,

Bishop Good moved to increasingly larger scale and to a naturalistic

use of color, although the photographs tend to be dark and shadowy,

the color muted. Color continues to be used to enhance the frisson

between Carly and the face on the TV.

A few of the “Carly TV” photographs make use of current, massmedia-

derived images, such as the Viagra piece (the only unmanipulated

work in the series) and several in which political figures like

Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Jesse Helms, and the Ayatollah Khomeini

appear. These works exploit the possibilities for social and political

commentary inherent in the intrusion of media images from the

world outside into a young girl’s protected environment of home

and hearth, leading the viewer to speculate on the messages contained

within the juxtapositions. Bishop Good has said that she

used some of these images to represent her fears about the political

climate and state of the nation. In the majority of the photographs,

however, it is the face of a figure from a painting by Edward

Hopper, Jan van Eyck, Goya, Jacques Louis David or others that is

framed by the dark rectangle of the television screen, the image at

times seeming to come out of the television to serve as a real presence

in the room.

Generally, the “televised” figures look directly at Carly or, like Carly,

out of the picture and at the viewer, so that he or she becomes the

third element in the equation, part of a triad. This effect is enhanced

by the enclosed nature of the interior, by the up-close, intimate

quality of the photographs, and by the fact that the vantage point

from which the photographs were taken seem to make them extensions

of the viewer’s space – he or she, in other words, is there.

Some of the photographs seem largely formal in intent, such as

Carly TV, Pink Cartoon (2000), in which pink-faced Grandpa from

the children’s show “Hey Arnold” looks companionably at Carly, who

wears an equally pink wig. The calligraphic nature of Carly’s pose

(the manner in which it is flattened in space) rhymes with the manner

in which the cartoon character was drawn. In contrast, Carly

TV, Blonde Parton (2000) seems intent on evoking a particular

mood. Here, Carly, wearing a wig of long, wavy blonde hair that

evokes the country western singing star of the title, lies with her

face pressed to the Berber carpet. She exudes a quietude and

sense of loneliness that mimic those of the woman in the detail of

the Hopper painting behind her, the raking light in the photograph

also echoing that found in the painting. In Carly TV, Marat (2000-

01), the image of Bishop Good’s face is eerily superimposed on

that of the French Revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat from Jacques

Louis David’s famous portrait of 1793. Carly, reclining on the floor

in a rectangular swath of light, peers out from below a voluminous

blonde wig, the shape and tones of her image rhyming with those

seen on the television screen. Both the Marat/Bishop Good character

and Carly stare directly out at the viewer, as if to dare interpretation.

What is the link between them? What meaning can be found?

Is Carly a femme fatale in the making (Charlotte Corday having

been Marat’s downfall)?

Although it embraces a wider range of narrative possibility and

mood, the “Carly TV Series” finds a precedent in a series of smallscale,

black-and-white photographs taken by the American photographer

Lee Friedlander (b.1934) in the 1960s. Although unfamiliar

to Bishop Good at the time she began her series (they were called

to her attention shortly thereafter), Friedlander’s photographs show

televisions playing in vacant motel rooms and living rooms, testifying

to the life of a peripatetic photographer who often finds himself in

impersonal surroundings. Faces, often of well-known people,

appear on the TV screens. Although the photographs are generally

without incident, in Aloha, Washington (1967), the image of Lyndon

Baines Johnson framed by the television engages in a dialogue with

family photographs perched on the cabinet above, one of them

being of a smiling young girl. This image suggests the potential for

playing a major political figure against the experience of a young

girl, anticipating by some thirty years Bishop Good’s photographs.

By coincidence, in a few works in the “Carly TV Series,” a framed

photograph of Carly that Bishop Good took many years before

rests upon the television. The juxtaposition of Carly with her

younger self embraces the concept of passing time and highlights

the intimacy and emotional resonance of Bishop Good’s work as

against Friedlander’s purposeful sterility.

In a number of the “Carly TV” photographs, as in Carly TV, Plaid

Shadow (2000), the scantily clad Carly wears a seemingly “come

hither” look while appearing in what may be considered a provocative

pose, raising the issue of childhood sexuality. A focus on adolescence

and particularly on the developing sexuality of young girls

has been widely seen in contemporary photography, as found in

Anna Gaskell’s elaborately staged and often implicitly violent storybook

scenarios, Justine Kurland’s photographs of packs of

girls/women in natural surroundings, Hellen van Meene’s lush, intimate,

and often disquieting portraits, and Sally Mann’s nude family

photographs and images of twelve-year-old girls, to name just a

few examples. Although Carly’s awareness of herself as a sexual

being emerges in some of Bishop Good’s later works, the “Carly TV

Series” was executed when Carly was quite young. She was a

serenely innocent, physical being whose posing and playacting produced

a few sexually ambiguous images. That Bishop Good chose

to subtly exploit these images may be understood to correspond

to recent trends.

Yet another contemporary parallel to Bishop Good’s work with

Carly is found in Roni Horn’s installation piece, This is Me, This is

You (1999-2000), which is composed of photographs of Horn’s

niece, Georgia Loy, between the ages of eight and ten years old.

The piece consists of two grids made up of cropped, closeup views

of Georgia’s face, which changes expression from frame to frame,

offering an extreme contrast to the evocative, quasi-narrative

images of a blank-faced Carly.

To produce the last works in the “Carly TV Series,” Bishop Good

rented a largely white-on-white hotel room in Hollywood, Florida, in

which to take photographs of Carly and a few friends playing dress-up

in the proximity of a television screen. The light-filled nature of the

space offers a strong contrast to the darkness and shadow of the

Pennsylvania living room and, as if in response to the brighter

palette, the content seems more transparent as well, each of the

works seeming to offer an unambiguous commentary on the roles

assigned to women in contemporary societies. In one, Carly sits on

the floor trying to fasten the buckle on a woman’s heeled shoe,

while the image of the Ayatollah Khomeini looms on the television

in the background, leading the viewer to reflect on the position of

women and young girls in restrictive Muslim countries. In another,

Carly and two other girls pause to look at the distraught face of a

woman on the television screen, raising the question of female role

models and of the path to womanhood that lies before them.