Observer
2005 - 2006
The images in the Observer series show the urban environment, with a painted silhouette of the photographer inserted.
Subverting the notion of a fixed subject captured by the photographer, I have projected my own image into the subject, marking each chosen location with a stencil of my profile, head inclined over my Rolleiflex waist level camera.
The camera is merely a recording device and, in documentary photography, the photographer is passive at the moment of image capture. The photographer is the observer. However, by inserting an icon representing the observer into the scene, that passivity crosses the boundary to activity. The observer becomes a subject.
By inserting an icon representing myself into the scene I (The observer) become a part of the subject. By adding the stencil and taking the image I am saying 'Consider the importance of looking at this. Look at me looking at this'. By doing this I am stating that what I am photographing is worth looking at.
The spaces visited, stencilled and photographed suggest their history through their disrepair. They are all sites with construction history, old buildings stood there, only to fall and become wastelands before completing the cycle by being built upon once more.
The restless times between tearing down the old and constructing the new are filled with life. The plants take over, as do those city people who feel at home in these kinds of in-between spaces; the homeless, the graffiti artists…
“Like an anthropologist, Abby Storey acknowledges that being a photographer of the human condition makes one a participant/observer, and in this series she is exploring how her symbolic, metaphorical, and actual presence affects her subject matter.”
John B Turner on the Observer Series,
MoMento Magazine - PhotoForum January 2008.
Media
MoMento: A recent PhotoForum NZ publication
1.1MB
Feature in Vision Magazine
548kb
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