A proposal for AD7801/A11 – Establishing Practice
Eugene Ionesco – The Chairs
“We will leave our mark, for we are people, not cities”
1997 Faber & Faber p55
I’m going to create a series of images of empty chairs. These will be work chairs, belonging to real people and I will photograph them in situ, as I find them, using available light.
My model for the photograph, and the jumping-off point for the project is a photograph I took in 2016 originally entitled “Sexworker’s Chair”, and latterly “Portrait of a Sexworker”.
I’m interested in the way that labour and identity become entwined, where one can cease to see a person and instead see an identity that has been overshadowed by the work that person does.
By not photographing the above mentioned sexworker, it was my intention to not label them, but instead label their situation. However both titles/captions I’ve used thus far have forced an identity upon them, even if they cannot be recognised from the photo.
“An image became a record of how X had seen Y”
John Berger – Ways of Seeing
1990 Penguin (p10),
My subject choice will take inspiration from the nomenclature of August Sander’s Face of Our Time, defining people as their profession, and creating a landscape portrait of them. I think it would be valid to pursue subjects in which the job title has been imbued with a broad, if perhaps simplistic societal understanding, such as firefighter, or doctor, as well as more esoteric identities.
The typological nature of the photographs will depend to some extent on the available space in which the chairs are found. The space is however, more important than the model for the typology.
At the moment I intend to present the images in a portfolio. I don’t believe this series will be concluded at the end of the semester, but believe there could be a book / exhibition of prints in time.