[The Guardian] The big picture: the pursuit of happiness in Playland, California

The big picture: the pursuit of happiness in Playland, California

Between work as a petroleum engineer and a clinical psychologist, ​photographer Chauncey Hare​ documented suburban life in the US

As well as being a revered photographer who had a 1977 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Chauncey Hare had other lives. He worked for 20 years as a petroleum engineer for Standard Oil and then retrained as a clinical psychologist, becoming a pioneer of research into the soul-crushing effects of corporate life. As well as a book called Work Abuse: How to Recognise and Survive It, he was perhaps most famous for a series of portraits of young American families in their mod-con homes, strangely isolated with their white goods, and a related series of pictures of men and women in open-plan offices, wondering quite what they were doing there.

Though Hare, who died in 2019 aged 84, tended to see his psychoanalytic work as the antithesis of his art, the two strands of his life both flash-lit the alienating values of the consumerist US, the promise of the pursuit of happiness in suburbia. Janet Malcolm, writing in the New Yorker, described how Hare’s photographs, apparently deliberately mundane, seemed to “quiver” with a “sense of latent meaning” so that “everything stands for something else”. She compared Hare’s framing of his subjects to “the way a psychoanalyst works with free association”.

Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work by Robert Slifkin is published by Mack (£20)

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