Breaking Bread (2022)
Critique of photography and within photography has historically centred systemic relationships— for example between class, race, and gender. Asystemic critique often disinherits the personal agency of individuals who exist within these systems, are governed by them, and in turn, influence the system.
Breaking Bread is a negotiation through and within photography that deals with themes of authorship and personal agency as they exist within a system. Through this negotiation, I offer an alternative economy of looking by considering an image as an event. Thusly, this work seeks to re-negotiate thedistribution of power in photography on an interpersonal level by premising ‘looking’ as an extractive act with a focus on the making and viewing of images. In making images, a photographer looks onto a subject; in viewing imagesan audience member may look onto a work. Consequently, a photographer and an audience member may be considered as privileged.
Part of the work uses socially engaged practice to explores photographer-subject relationship within a photographic making space. I, as photographer, set up a studio space with lights and camera but then negotiate the space to the subject to perform anything they desire, shifting the definition of subject, audience and
photographer. In a manner, by not engaging in a 'the decisive moment', further disseminating my privilege, as a photographer who does looking, to the subject.
The second part of this work is a series of video portraits created as a result of this socially engaged practice. This work explored a viewer-image relationship. By premising looking as an extractive act, the work through installation practice, obfuscates viewing.
I am less concerned with what is photographed or the content of the image, but rather how the interpersonal relationships within photographyare negotiated. The work is not about the creative output or practice of photography; instead it is a critique into the ways of photographic making and viewing— the economies of which each of us should have a right to negotiate.