Untitled (2011) is a collection of images created over the course of a year across several subjects.
Underexposed, occasionally blurry and explicit, they document a range of young women with a closeness, an unsettling tension and an unpretentious honesty, often leaving viewers to piece together each narrative using the smallest of deductions and vaguest of observations. Who are these women? What is the relationship between artist and subject? The visual drama and the evasiveness in each image helps to keep viewers at a distance and yet simultaneously, palpably close to the women themselves.
The sessions, some over several hours, others fleeting or brief, present these young women in their most desirable, vulnerable and relaxed states and poses; the consistent choice of the bedroom as a key narrational tool, being arguably the most sacred of living spaces, helping emphasise the delicacy of the intimacy gifted both to artist and audience. The use of anonymity, whether in omitting faces, erring with focusing or emphasising shadows, helps not only facilitate an arena of personal expression away from their real world identities, but also prompts a deeper, sometimes surreal focus onto the flesh itself; the breasts, genitals and torsos, their collective sexual readiness and how they exist within their very own personal environments.
The prevailing candidness across the images, both enticing and unbiased, is undeniable: seldom are the images posed or overtly prompted, making the resulting photographs just as much of a insight into the voyeuristic pursuit of the artist, as the cathartic process of each subject— a pursuit based upon a desire to immortalise the authentic, or rather, ideas in relation to the authentic beyond the familiarities in both approach and aesthetic commonly associated with observed female nudity in mainstream media and art.
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