A Sociopath With a Camera...

The private view for the afore mentioned 'Shift' exhibition where I am exhibiting work with 16 other photographers was last Friday. It went unbelievably well. The exhibition was busy from start to close, wine was a-flowing, and merriment was in the air. 

The highlight for me was that people genuinely engaged with my work. Exhibiting and watching people engage/not engage with my work is what i love most about photography. It gives me the chance to see how 'the other' views my work and therefore measure it's success. After all, my work is intentionally instrumental.

The abstract featured in the exhibition booklet explaining my work is as follows:

The driving force behind my work is always an issue that I feel strongly about and want to act upon in some way. Issues that I have worked on include: the illegality of war in the middle east; the 2010 United Kingdom general election; and also a few, more personal narratives. The views that I present are generally exaggerated and often quite obscure. For some, my use of symbolism isn’t always immediately obvious. Symbolism is one of the cornerstones in my work and coding images with symbolism is one of the things that I enjoy most about my practice.

The project ‘Mundane and Monumental’ is a response to the constant state of flux in which people find themselves. When taken out of context, any two events in a given persons life may seem unlinked from an objective observer. However the way in which people think is a complete mystery to anyone else and two events which, may seem unconnected, are in fact intimately connected.

I encouraged another photographer who was exhibiting (Callum Kirkwood) to deduce the intended/correct narrative which i had used to exemplify the subject matter of the work as explained in the abstract. He, amongst others, struggled to glean the exact narrative, guessing around and sometimes the exact reason for the elements included in the piece, but failing to compile it with other knowledge they had failed to gather.

Callum's induced interest in my work quickly caught on and soon, more people were asking me what the work was about. I replied 'I can't tell you that. You have to work it out for yourself.' I got mixed responses to this standpoint on my work.

It isn't that I don't like talking about my work. Quite the contrary, I could talk about my own work (the ego-central being that I am) for hours upon hours. However, from my point of view, if I explain the entire work then surely it is just me talking and the work has been produced as a jumped up conversation starter. 

The main aim of my work is to encourage engagement with the environment. In a way i suppose its trying to get people to view the world as I do. Everything has happened as a direct or indirect result of the action or inaction of something else. Therefore I include symbology in my work which must be deciphered entirely to be read correctly.

My symbology doesn't appear to follow any conventions, intentionally anyway. It's more a compilation of various social conventions and their connotations. (For example: In 'The Mundane and The Monumental' I use a fork and knife sat parallel atop a pile of pasta on a plate. This positioning of cutlery, to me, implies that the meal is finished. Yet setting this arrangement upon a pile of pasta somewhat confuses the meaning as the meal is clearly unfinished therefore transforming the reading to a subjects unwillingness to eat.)

The first conclusion I can draw from this is doubt. I am now having doubts at how effective my work will be after university. Maybe my symbology is more geared towards my understanding of these symbols rather than their wider context within society. I now realise that what i am trying to do is create a whole new visual language, no small feat, and if I want the work to be universally translatable I will need to work on this. I do not wish, however, to adjust my style of working as the symbology included in my work is an incredibly important tool. It allows and encourages an engagement between the viewer and the piece's message.

The second and final of my conclusions is that i am indeed, a sociopath with a camera. Saying what I have, it is more evident than ever now that my work purely manipulates people. It frustrates the viewer intentionally, and to be honest, I like it like that. If nothing else, it stirs some kind of response in viewers. I suppose.