I loved that show so much. To be honest, I often work with Josephine Pryde in mind. The way she uses photography to uncover what’s unseen or hidden opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the medium. For the shows in Athens, at Akwa Ibom and Radio Athènes, the different qualities of vision came into play both literally and metaphorically. Vision isn’t just about what is seen with the eyes, but rather how that is also internalised and imagined. The camera becomes a tool that mediates these processes, helping to access what remains hidden, whether external or internal.
Using a macro lens was a very conscious decision I made early on for these works. I have very bad eyesight, which people often find amusing, given that I work with photography. The macro lens, by allowing me to focus on things at an extremely close range, gave me a way to mimic the experience of seeing for myself. It emphasises the physicality of seeing, how for me, focus only emerges when something is in very close proximity. By shooting at such a close range, I wanted to mirror that sensation, where vision becomes an intimate act, a process of bringing the world closer in order to make sense of it.
Yes, self-examination is a key element in the work. It acts as a way of turning the camera inward, shifting the focus from outward projection to a more introspective analysis.
In Bus ride to the city, a suite of 12 photographs taken during a single bus ride into the City of London, the experiential factor comes into focus. Framed through a folded TfL ticket, the images, with their distorted reflections and passing scenes, capture a fragmented sense of time. Offering brief, disconnected glimpses of an otherwise continuous journey, they create a sense of suspended movement within an inherently linear experience.
I feel there is something about the accessibility of familiar environments, particularly domestic spaces, that opens up the potential for a different reading of time embedded in the photographs. By removing or choosing to hold on to certain details, Moyra Davey’s photographs, images that do not exist solely in the present, but also have pasts and futures, offer a fragmented view of the everyday, transforming it into an uncanny alternative. In this way, the images that form GIRL resist offering a resolution; instead, they depict an ongoing process of reflection and a search for something just out of reach, within spaces that feel familiar, yet remain unknowable.
I think catharsis is a big life-depends-on-it word. I wouldn’t necessarily call it that. It’s more about putting things in order, non-linearly but still in some sort of a narrative syntax.
The fragmented, sequential nature of the slide projectors allows for the images to exist suspended somewhere between stillness and movement. Before shooting the work I was reading Agamben’s Nymphs, a book on Aby Warburg’s Atlas. In the first segment Agamben writes about phantasmata in choreography, which is the sudden arrest between two movements. The life of images isn’t just about being still or eventually moving again; it’s the pause in between that’s full of tension and energy, or as Agamben writes, a pause which is not immobile. And so, one’s interiority that is directly connected with the subconscious mind, appears in flashes, just as the clicking of the projector or the shutter of the camera.
Working with a succession of photographs primarily came from a need to understand how images work together, and how they create meaning. Compositionally but also conceptually, repetition allows for a different interpretation where the moment is not embalmed on the film emulsion, but rather it is shot again and again, in an obsessive refusal of the photographic principle which is the decisive moment or the instant of capture. Agamben’s text definitely resonates with this concept, and further emphasises how pauses, the gaps in between, are equally as important as the images themselves.
The triptych made sense in the way it could represent a beginning, middle and ending to the story, going back to the structure of a narrative syntax. Or more so its refusal. I also think that rhythm is a very distinctive element of the work, since the clicking sound of the projectors is amplified and transmitted live throughout the space, which could only be created through the use of multiple machines.
And I think that was made possible through both the visual and the audio elements of the work. Introducing sound, or deciding to enhance the already existing sound, came from a need to work with the machines that allow GIRL to exist. The slide projectors, like any tool, have their own specs, and I typically like to work around these parameters. For example, following the circular structure of the carousel, which carries itself in a loop; hence the non-linear structure of the work. No beginning or end, just an ongoing continuum.
That makes me so happy. The piece I showed at Slade, Olympus and Nikon, was actually a piece where I photographed my sister, Korina as she portrayed me. We shot it in the lobby of a flat we used to live in, which felt like a kind of non-place, an in-between of interior and exterior space. I liked the idea of a kind of cyclical, neverending space, which ties into how the carousel works; there’s no real progression, just a loop. The projectors being placed back to back sort of mirrors that, making the viewer experience the work in these alternating loops of perspective.
