Photographic estrangement: the measure of distance in photographic relationships

摘要

This research project investigates how estrangement is manifested within the photographic image, and how levels of estrangement establish conditions for the relationships between the subject, viewer and artist. Since the medium's inception the photographic process has involved encountering and negotiating otherness and the place of strangers. Over time a consistent photographic power dynamic has been established, and this project examines to what extent participants in this dynamic can escape or yield to the historically sedimented structures in which they find themselves participating. The images in this body of work tread the line between typological portraits and tentative encounters with strangers. These encounters/images do not suggest personal identity but question what it is to be a photographic subject. Rather than offer psychological insight into the subject, they attempt to foreground the signifying systems and process of photographic "representation". The project explores estrangement through physical and conceptual distance, negotiating photography's relationship to the real as a process, an image and an object.