Canon global

I’ve been using photographs to produce works of art for about two years. The photographs I used were taken by Jean-Eugene Atget, a famous photographer who worked in Paris from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. I might have chosen to use his photographs for my work because I felt his desire to keep recording 19th century Paris, which was disappearing as the city modernized, for future generations represented the original function and purpose of photography.

There are several reasons why I came to use this technique. I had spent time looking for new techniques, and had doubts about using my own photographs. But, the biggest reason was that I had doubts about moving toward a more fundamental “act of seeing.” For example, when I look at an old photograph, I sometimes feel a sense of irritation. The world in the photograph actually existed, and though that might be obvious to anybody, I still feel the reality of the photograph only faintly. This led me, in the production of my work, to place the act of “looking at photographs” at the beginning.

I think about the “act of seeing” through a production process that sees me look at an old photograph, create the subject, and photograph it.

At first I couldn’t work out how he’d got these photographs. I wondered whether such an artificial looking world actually existed for real.

In the end I realized that they weren’t ordinary photographs, and then I understood. The frames, for example–everything was done so well, in such detail, that I was almost completely taken in. I was really impressed with the level of perfection.

One trend these days is to take photographs of situations filled with humanity and life, but at the other extreme we have a work like this, a work that depicts an artificial world that doesn’t seem as though it could really exist. Expressing things like this in a visual format is also an aspect of photography. These are photographs that you want to frame and put on display.