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Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort presents a varied and challenging cross-section of contemporary work, all of it devoted to life at home. While the exhibition makes no attempt at sociological objectivity, the many voices it assembles have much to say about life in the eighties.

Long a staple of literature and film, domestic life has emerged over the past decade as an important theme in American photography. The exhibition surveys this development in approximately 150 pictures, a majority of them in color, by about seventy artists. The work, all but a small fraction of it made since 1980, is diverse in style, sensibility, and scale.

In the accompanying book, curator Peter Galassi suggests that artists “began to photograph at home not because it was important, in the sense that political issues are important, but because it was there—the one place that is easier to get to than the street. After they had worked for a while, many also realized that the overlooked opportunity was also a rich one, full of uncharted mysteries.” In Doug DuBois’s family photographs, such as My Sister Lise, Christmas Eve (1984), moments that only an insider might notice are rendered with an intimacy that only an insider could possess.