Portfolio > Impersonal Mythologies

"The farther you are from your own home, the more simplified your identity becomes...And sometimes this loss of identity is an attractive escape from the complexity of yourself." --from a Camille Henrot letter

While on an extended break from my own visual arts practice, I spent two years travelling nomadically and working as an art model for hobbyist photographers. I felt a relief in moving from a subject to the object of a work, in a temporary refusal of my own agency. In the way silently posing allowed me to identify with sculpture, rather than as sculptor. (I acknowledge the luxury of having the freedom to deliberately choose this.)

In these images, I am the model and I am making the choices around my own poses, while the photographer controls everything else, from the mise-en-scene to the final edit. In a final turn back to subjectivity, I have paired each image with my own writing -- loosely connected as minimalist, absurd mythologies.

Text 3
Photography (credit: Paul Ward) + fiction
2022
Text 2
Photography (credit: Paul Ward) + fiction
2022
Text 1
Photography (credit: Paul Ward) + fiction
2022