All the images presented here are captured on 35mm black and white film using a cheap, mass produced snapshot travel camera from the 1970s. The ideas of tourism, visiting and sightseeing have always been keen motivators in how I approach my work – even when on ‘home turf’. Being a tourist somehow validates voyeurism and permits entrance or invasion to territory or situations that ordinary do not grant such authorisation. It becomes acceptable to ‘invade and pervade’ because our presence will be fleeting, temporary and non-confrontational – snap! – move on. The tourist disappears. It is assumed that the purpose of the images is for personal record and posterity, the documentation of a holiday or daytrip. There’s no apparent threat in the private travel photography albums of the general snapshot tourist.
The photographs in the following slides document an ongoing body of work using a process that celebrates the snapshot aesthetic and the notion of being an outsider, a visitor, a foreigner, perhaps alien and detached.
This is about being removed and distanced, seeing the surface but questioning the foundations and fundamentals. What lies beneath? The stories, the narratives? Metaphors and allegories? We are all too enthralled with our own wrappings of comfort and security at the expense of isolation and segregation. Yet the irony remains : Surfaces may differ from street to street, town to town, corner to corner, but the question of ‘what lies beneath?’, no matter how complicated to answer, the verdict does not change : Nothing. Everything is the same.
Apparently we are supposed to ‘learn from history’, unfortunately, we rarely do.
The photographs in the following slides document an ongoing body of work using a process that celebrates the snapshot aesthetic and the notion of being an outsider, a visitor, a foreigner, perhaps alien and detached.
This is about being removed and distanced, seeing the surface but questioning the foundations and fundamentals. What lies beneath? The stories, the narratives? Metaphors and allegories? We are all too enthralled with our own wrappings of comfort and security at the expense of isolation and segregation. Yet the irony remains : Surfaces may differ from street to street, town to town, corner to corner, but the question of ‘what lies beneath?’, no matter how complicated to answer, the verdict does not change : Nothing. Everything is the same.
Apparently we are supposed to ‘learn from history’, unfortunately, we rarely do.
