For Tierney Gearon, photography is a 'hobby, like knitting or playing tennis'. But her unvarnished description is one that fails to hint at the power of her work: the Atlanta-raised photographer produces exhilaratingly personal images – often featuring her children and her mother – that compel you to feel as deeply as she does. Gearon, 45, a former ballet dancer and model who also has a commercial and editorial career shooting for publications including the New York Times and this magazine, insists, 'It's not a business for me. My work is like a diary. I do it for my soul.'
It was exactly eight years ago, in January 2001, when Gearon, then almost unknown in the art world, first showed her work in London (her home city for some 15 years until she relocated to LA five years ago). Forming part of the Saatchi Gallery's photography exhibition I Am a Camera, her work ended up eclipsing everything else in the show. The News of the World proclaimed her nude and semi-clothed photographs of her children (then aged seven and four) taken on holiday 'perversion under the guise of art'; police visited the gallery, questioning Gearon and requesting that the photographs be removed. The gallery refused, and no charges were brought.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1963, Tierney Gearon was spotted by a European modeling agency while studying ballet in Utah. After five years of traveling as a model, an agent in Paris, impressed by a small scrap book of Polaroid photographs Gearon had taken of other models she worked with, encouraged her to extend her repertoire and she was launched into the world of fashion photography, earning respect from many of the most influential fashion houses.
The family snapshots of Tierney Gearon have only recently come to the attention of the art world through her significant presence in the ‘I Am A Camera’ exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London in spring 2001.
