Untitled, 2008, from Pre-marital Bliss by Tim J. Veling
Pre-Marital Bliss is a body of work entered by contender Tim J. Veling. Where at first glance the work appears to reference the blown-out flash photography of Terry Richardson, the subject and heart of the work—intimate domestic relationships—seems closer to Larry Sultan's Pictures From Home.
Tim writes:
Lizzie and I began dating in 2006. Before long we moved into a ramshackle, Victorian style two room apartment together. Our bedroom doubled as my studio space, with cameras, printers and work prints covering most surfaces. Lizzie did her best to make the place feel like home, finding knick-knacks in thrift shops and offsetting my mess with quirky ornaments and details. Not long after settling into our new, shared life I started photographing it.
The photographs, part of a series of about fifty, capture both the good times and the bad, the funny and the ordinary, and the thick and the thin of their relationship. However, the work is much more intimate than objective. Like the title, mashing-up "pre-marital sex" with the 50's archetype of "marital bliss," the images are honest, funny and modern.
Mastectomy Scar, 2006, from These are the days, by Tim J. Veling
Another series on Tim's website, These are the Days, documents his mother's experience with breast cancer; as Tim puts it, "the story of a family regaining strength by dealing with a grief that once pushed them apart." The same kind of honest, intimate documentation as in Pre-Marital Bliss is what makes these photos so poignant. Again, the large set of images fans out to document the surroundings and effects of it's subject matter. Tim writes that, "Having spent most of his adolescent years bedridden with chronic Crohn's disease, the camera became the perfect excuse to step outside his own personal sphere." However, both of these series seem to reside in the relational space between himself and other people.
Tim is currently a practicing artist and professor of photography in New Zealand. You can see more of work, including all the photographs from both of the series above, on his website.