Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work

by Robert Slifkin

Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare's Photographic Work is the first critical biography of the American photographer Chauncey Hare (1934-2019). Although Hare received a significant, if fleeting, degree of professional success, including a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1977, an Aperture monograph, and three Guggenheim fellowships, his work has not received the critical attention it deserves and his extraordinary life story remains obscure. This lack of recognition has much to do with Hare's fanatical aversion to the commercial realms of the art world even at the height of his professional success. Perhaps his most overt declaration of aesthetic disavowal was his ultimate decision to renounce his identity as an artist in 1985 and pursue a career as a clinical therapist specializing in "work abuse" (which is also the title of a book he co-authored on the subject in 1997). Hare would subsequently donate his entire archive to the Bancroft Library at the University of California-notably not the Berkeley Museum of Art-with the provision that the original prints cannot be exhibited and that any reproduction of his work must include a caption that states that the photograph was created "to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people by multinational corporations and their elite owners and managers." Quitting Your Day Job considers the vexed relation between art and politics that defined Hare's career, drawing upon largely unexamined archival materials, new interviews and analyzing Hare's brilliant and moving photographs alongside the prolix and oftentimes bathetic prefaces he wrote for the three collections of his photographs. The book presents a wide-ranging critical account of Hare's life and art, suggesting the ways in which his work continues to resonate with contemporary concerns about the reach of corporations into everyday life, documentary photography's longstanding complicity with the politics of liberal guilt, and art's vexed relation to elite channels of power.

Genres: Photography, Art

160 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2022

About the author

Robert Slifkin, a specialist in later-modern and contemporary American art, with interests ranging from James McNeill Whistler to contemporary art criticism, has been named Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. Professor Slifkin will begin teaching in the fall of 2010.

Professor Slifkin earned his BA in History with a minor in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He subsequently obtained his MA in the History of Art from Williams College, followed by his PhD from Yale University, which was conferred in 2007. Before coming to the Institute of Fine Arts he was Assistant Professor of Art and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Professor Slifkin has completed a book titled Out of Time: Philip Guston’s Return to Figuration and the Crisis in the Humanities and is beginning work on a project called Incidental Cenotaphs: The Renewal of Monumentality in Contemporary Art. His recent publications include “Butterfly Money: James Whistler as the Invisible Man” in James McNeill Whistler in Context: Essays from the Whistler Symposium, University of Glasgow, 2003 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2008).

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have personal reasons for my attraction to Chauncey Hare. Fed up with my job in marketing and seeing a decaying future for copywriting, I am also leaving my career to begin another as a therapist, and this is the angle I came at this book with. I also have a burgeoning interest in photography. It was an easy connection to make.

Chauncey Hare lived a wild life. Graduating with an Ivy-league degree in chemical engineering, he admits that he could not have asked for any greater privilege in the 1950s. Yet instead, he found his corporate work stultifying, and was filled with dread and anxiety. To alleviate this, he began taking documentary photographs, resulting in multiple Guggenheim grants and an exhibition at the MoMA all while maintaining his job at Standard Oil.

First focusing his photography on the interiors of working class homes, his work chronicled the alienation of corporate labor. With his second grant, he was able to expand the focus of his work towards the workplace itself. Hare’s intense dissatisfaction with corporate America produced incredible images of corporate managers and factory workers. This came at a cost. By identifying financialization in the art establishment and tastemaking, he made himself an enemy of the MoMA and SFMoMA, and found himself unemployable as both a professor and an engineer. He increasingly became obsessed with New Age thinking, which were reflected in his image-making. My favorite chronicle of his work during the time is his vandalization of a MoMA catalog dissecting how corporate interests had invaded the art world. He was never wrong in his critiques, per se, but they all reflected self-sabotage.

After his wife divorced him, he moved in with one of the workers he documented and started art workshops that barely covered the bills. Middle-aged and without prospects, he eventually switched careers to become a therapist specializing in work abuse.

This book is great, but I would have liked to have learned more about his life after photography. Given a lack of documentation during this time, it isn’t surprising that this is omitted. I highly recommend this for any lover of photography or hater of corporatization.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and well presented study of a photographer who went against the grain of the new documentarians of the 60s and 70s (like Winogrand and Arbus), to the point that he actually became arch enemies with John Szarkowski and his whole school of thought. Thought provoking counterpoint and critique of what I had just accepted as the fine art photo canon—refreshing. Also a decent survey of Hare’s photos, which are otherwise difficult to find. I would have given it five stars if there weren’t sloppy, glaring typos on every dang page—desperately in need of professional proofreading.

[Rachel Davies · Rating 5 out of 5]

rly well written biography