Sadie Benning is a video maker who was one of the earliest video bloggers/video diary keepers. She was one of the vanguards who used the camera as both confidant and confessional. One of the many things I respect about Benning and her work is her honesty and authenticity. She is immediately able to achieve disarming intimacy with her camera and courageously explores her lesbian sexuality in front of her lens.
Benning is famous for using the Fisher-Price PixelVision camera in her work. The PixelVision was a durable toy camera that made innovative use of audio cassettes to record video. Grainy black and white images are recorded on these (at the time) widely available and inexpensive cassettes. As the story goes, Sadie’s father (an experimental filmmaker himself) gave her the PixelVision as a gift. Sadie was initially pissed off having hoped to receive a “real camcorder” not a dumb toy that shot black-and-white video. She started to use it anyway.
The PixelVision is now a collector's item.
In the end she liked the “lack of judgment” that the camera had. Instead of writing a diary in front of a mirror as other teenage girls might do, Sadie used her camera as a kind of (video) “diary mirror”. One of her pieces called If Every Girl Had a Diary is a beautiful video self-exploration that features ultra close-ups of her body. The work delves into issues of sexual identity, self-representation, body image and stereotype.
Benning made use of the Pixelvision’s portability to shoot herself in close-up, often in her bedroom. The grittiness of the PixelVision format only adds to the engagement and sense of truth. Even though this was years before YouTube arrived, she made her work public through various venues such as film festivals and became one of the youngest artists to be exhibited at the Whitney Museum.
In the late 1990s Sadie joined the band Le Tigre and stayed with them through 2001. Today, she continues to create videos that are shown as installations at galleries around the world. Sadie Benning has many fans and has had an influence on countless young filmmakers and video bloggers, but she is not without critics. If you’ve never checked out her work, you can make up her own mind by clicking the links below.
Sadie Benning
Selections of Sadie Benning’s Works
If Every Girl Had a Diary
http://www.vdb.org/node/1935
A Place Called Lovely
http://www.vdb.org/titles/place-called-lovely
It Wasn’t Love
http://www.vdb.org/titles/it-wasnt-love
Sadie in an early Le Tigre performance in Chicago