Diane Durant: Stories
Diane Durant (b. 1978) works with image, text, and found objects to tell true stories, from paddling rivers and road trips to all the everyday stops in between. She is a graduate of Baylor University (BFA '01), Dallas Theological Seminary (MA/BC '04), and the University of Texas at Dallas (MA '07, PhD '13) where she currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Instruction and Director of the Marilyn & Jerry Comer Collection of Photography. She serves on the university's Committee for the Support of Diversity and Equity as well as the Social Justice Council for the WNBA's Dallas Wings organization. Diane is a member of both the Board of Directors for the Cedars Union, a non-profit arts incubator in North Texas, and the Society for Photographic Education’s LGBTQ Caucus Leadership Team. She is also Chair of the SouthCentral Chapter. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally; appeared online at Don't Smile and Lenscratch; featured in print with Chronicles and Sun Magazine; and belong to the permanent collection of the National Park Service. Her creative writing has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, RiverSedge, di-verse-city, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Stymie, and The Spectacle. She is the former president of 500X Gallery in Dallas and past editor of The Grassburr, The Rope, Sojourn, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. In 2018, Diane was named as one of four inaugural Carter Community Artists with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. Her first monograph, Stories, 1986–88, was released by Daylight Books in April. More often than not, she eats cake for breakfast.
RR: Hey Diane, how are things with you at this turn of the year?
DD: Hi, Raul! Boy, it feels like life is moving so quickly. We’re good here—just trying to get back into the full swing of school. Or as full of a swing as we can, all pandemic things considered. Maybe it’s more like a drag bunt.
RR: The pandemic threw so much for a loop last year including the launch and official release of your photo book, Stories, 1986–88, with Daylight Books. Have you managed to bounce back and get it into people's hands?
DD: Yeah, it really did. We were supposed to launch the book at Paris Photo New York (formerly AIPAD) in April but it was canceled. Then everything was canceled. Once the world started to open back up, there were much more pressing things happening that folks needed to respond to and support, and promoting my book just didn’t feel right. So in December, I finally started talking about the project again on social media. Individual works from the book had been in several exhibitions, and I was speaking on some panels and giving talks, so asking people to buy my book came a bit more naturally. But we still have a ways—and many boxes of advance copies stacked up in the closet—to go before we bounce back completely. (Hint, hint.)
RR: I’m glad to hear it Dr. Could you tell us a little bit of what your work, Stories, 1986–88, is about?
DD: Oh, gosh. The short answer is that it’s about me—who I was, and who I was never allowed to be, fully. More universally, it’s an unveiling of what it was like in the 80s to be a tomboy in the south, to struggle with all that entailed, and to survive by any means possible. Which, for me, usually meant asserting my individuality in subtle ways, finding small victories in funny costumes and mudpies and sports. Sure, playing the piano rather than the trumpet may seem minor, but in the context of all the ways I found myself negated instead of celebrated, it paints a bigger picture that I couldn’t appreciate until I went through the process of looking back, with clearer eyes, in an attempt to heal that part of me and take care of my younger self 30 years later. And it was so incredibly therapeutic. I began the process with much more cynicism than I ended with, and the freedom I found, in giving myself the past I wished I would have had, is something that I get to carry with me moving forward. And to go through it with my daughter, and share all the stories with her, made it even more life-giving.
RR: The work you produced is very poignant and telling of your story. It’s especially wonderful how you collaborate with your daughter in the making of photographs. Could you describe how you navigate these roles together; mother/daughter and photographer/protagonist?
DD: Protagonist. I like it. I don’t think I’ve ever really put it in those terms before, either. I think of her as a characterization of my younger self, and that’s how we talked about it too when we were preparing for a shoot, but declaring her a protagonist in what is the retelling of my childhood stories, feels particularly empowering. Thank you for that. As far as navigating our collaboration, it was probably a 60/40 split. Of course I had the final say, and I was the one who generated the ideas and costumes and locations, but she was the one who brought the character of me to life—again. We have always had a photographer/subject relationship, so working together creatively really wasn’t difficult, even though there were definitely times when one (or both) of us just didn’t feel like getting out there, but we did it anyway. We didn’t have the luxury of waiting until it snowed again or until my next birthdate or until those shorts weren’t as short.
RR: There is a whimsical approach to the portraits that I find endearing but is then followed by a more revealing aspect when we read the text that you underscore them with. How do text + image work together in your series?
DD: You know, the relationship between the image and text in this series is really central to the concept of the book. Though the text is most often placed below the visual image, it is not meant to be subservient. They are coequal in their representation of the truths I was exploring and remaking, and each can stand apart from the other, in theory. The juxtapositions and contrarities created between the images and texts are at the core of the reimagining of my childhood narratives, but there are also several instances in the book where a written text is presented on its own, without an accompanying visual image—the reader must develop their own mental picture. This affords the text some additional authority in the storytelling and creates an opportunity for the reader to become more involved as well. And it’s also worth noting that the font used for the texts is one I created out of my own handwriting with the hope of both personalizing the writings and giving them an air of diaristic authenticity. After all, these stories are true...
RR: Remaking your truth sounds really empowering. Im glad this was your exploration with the work. I’m especially interested in your process of reimagining yourself as a child, through a literal part of you (being Andie, your daughter) and allowing them a place to exist. It feels like an amalgamation of time, space, cosmic presence and versions of yourself you may be in another universe OR here and now but also then.
DD: The project is definitely a reinterpretation of the past, but it’s also an experience in the present. You’re absolutely right. I quite literally dragged my past into the present—Cabbage Patch Kid birth certificates, my brother’s Pee Wee football garb, my Original Jams and Girl Scout uniform and all the meaningless things my mother saved in shoe boxes in her garage—cutting it up and pasting it back together like a candid collage and then sending it back out into the world in a way that family albums and lookbooks (and social media?) still attempt to do today. A medley, or even a pastiche of all my life’s relics, real and imagined, hoped for and lived in actuality. I think that’s what made publishing the series as a book so crucial, in keeping with the idea that family snapshots are revealing in their truths but not always completely accurate, that family albums were created to be shared and to live on in perpetuity as a document of what was. Stories, 1986–88 is my renegotiated “what was.” My reimagined past.
RR: Renegotiated. I like that too. How does it feel completing this work and having the physical book come to life?
DD: Honestly, it’s pretty surreal, but it’s an achievement I’ve had my heart set on since elementary school when I decided I would publish a book by the time I was 40. I don’t know if 40 just seemed really far away and thus enough time to complete a book or if I understood then that 40 was this extremely significant, albeit arbitrary, benchmark in a person’s life that I didn’t want to pass me by—in 30 years. Maybe it was both. I was a very pensive, future-directed kid, which may seem a bit ironic now since my book is about the past. But a book was my goal, along with getting a PhD in humanities and a black belt in karate, and two out of three isn’t too shabby! (I’m only a green belt in Tae Kwon Do so far, so I will have to move the goal line a bit on that one.)
RR: Any new work on the horizon?
DD: Yes and no. Or yes and nothing I’m ready to disclose just yet. With the official launch of the book being set back by the pandemic, I feel like I’m just now starting to promote it. And I really want to give it the attention it deserves, though it’s tempting to move on to other ideas since it’s been almost two years since the book went into production. It feels like this work should have already had its time. So I am thankful for opportunities like this to talk about the project, to remind everyone (and myself!) that I published a book—and by the time I was 40, no less.
RR: Well I can’t wait to add Stories, 1986-88 to my personal collection. Thank you for your time Dr. Durant.
DD: Thank you, Raul!