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Photographing Girls
Suzanne Mooney, at Viewfinder
How does one explain the peculiar connections that crop up in the mind when random events occur at the same time? Is it synchronicity? Some peculiar form of parallel evolution of ideas? Or simply the desire to find meaning and common purpose where there might have been none?
Suzanne Mooney's work at Viewfinder looks at the way photography in mass culture is used and received as a tool of exploitation and empowerment. The group show 'Bounty', at APT (opening on the same night) explores notions of paradise found and paradise lost - did Fletcher Christian fall for an archetypal Beauty, and if so was it his fault?
In short - to what do we owe our images of beauty and how much are we in control? If the model 'makes love to the camera' is it the photographer who is seduced? What would Vermeer think?
Photographing Girls (2007) depicts found images that the artist has been collating and gathering from various sources including books, magazines, newspapers and the Internet, from advertisements to professional self-portraits. The sequence of images, all female, are shown on a digital display screen and at a disarmingly intimate scale. Taken out of their original context, they reconfigure the gaze, making the photographer both the subject and object of the work.
Alongside this piece, or perhaps more accurately 'framing' it, is a series of large-scale vinyl works taken from a collection of diagrammatic drawings entitled Make Love to the Camera. These images are based on those found in photographic manuals depicting how to photograph the female nude, but here, removed from their original context and blown up out of all proportion they cease to exist as functional drawings.
Are they totems or flags, a rule book or a constitution?
What would Fletcher Christian have done if he'd had a camera?
Make Love to the Camera
Suzanne Morley
2007