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Sally Mann, an artist with whom Guy Ben-Ner is frequently compared, despite the vast differences between their practices, has tried to downplay the importance of family in her work, arguing that the significance of her landscape images equals that of the subtly provocative photographs of her prepubescent children that made her famous in the early 1990s. For now, at least, Ben-Ner suffers no similar delusions. His recent show included two videos that--as is by now customary in his work--employed his family. The videos also dig deeper into the history, structure, and power relations within families and explore what it means to use your wife and kids as artistic fodder.
