The work of today's contender, Elizabeth Clark Libert, is intimate, complex and unsettling. One could argue that the subject that Libert chose for this photographic study would, if done as well and as thoughtfully, elicit this range of emotions from any viewer. This subject is Libert herself, her family, and their dynamic with one another within a culture that scrutinizes much of what her camera catches on display: privilege, wealth, status, and the staples and trappings of such. To riff off of Tolstoy, everyone's family is materialistic and miserly both in their own ways.

Jeff, the Libert-y, 2010 by Elizabeth Clark Libert

My feelings and attitudes about class and societal divisions are probably as rife with internal conflict as anyone else: while there are always those who have more than I do, my mind reasons as it covets, and realizes there are always scores upon scores more with so much less. And that knowledge does not usually comfort, but rather produces a kind of complicit and composed guilt. What Libert shows us in her series Libert & Company is that it is possible to have much, much much more than most people can reasonably expect or imagine having, and then to remain acutely conscious of the economic disparity between yourself and the world-at-large while wanting to make something from it that attempts to understand status from the inside-out.

Liz and Mardee, 2010 Palm Beach by Elizabeth Clark Libert

Private yachts, jets, expensive works of art, seemingly endlessly flowing champagne, furs and other evident accessories of the pedigreed and powerful are laid bare for the viewer to see in Libert's photographs, but their tone and manner of, well, just thereness, belies that these things are not there to gawk at, or to throw in face of the collective economic dis-ease that we've been experiencing as a culture for the past two years. These things just are. These habits and the possessions of this family are just what passes for normal; they are not there to apologize.

That said, arriving at this through the making of the family biography isn't without its caveats. In her artist's statement Libert writes:

I've been hesitant to share photographs that evidence the wealthy background that I grew up in, especially given the current state of the economy, fearful that the images of myself and loved ones would be sure to elicit negative reactions from viewers. The study explores the conflicted, often painful for me, emotions of guilt, pride, love, hate, disgust, envy, lust, loathing and entitlement. "Libert & Company" is both a family and self-portrait that opens and reveals these conflicted feelings. It is a purposeful journey for me at a stage in my life where I am pushing to understand my layered feelings and which my art helps to uncover and expose.

My sense of these photographs is that while the art of the self-portrait itself is an elusive, often self-slapping undertaking, trying to understand the self through the filter of the familial whole, thus creating a metaphorical "family portrait" in the most cannily psychoanalytical sense, is a much more dense and complicated undertaking. I find myself riveted in the images from this series that are available to view in its entirety on Libert's website, and I'm not alone: Libert & Company has been lauded by no less than Photo District News and the most recent New York Photo Festival in early May.

In addition to the images from this body of work shown on Libert's website, a self-published Blurb book of the series is also available.