Created for Format Film Festival 2009 with Latitude Photographers.
Brief: The inter-relation of filmic and photographic narrative.
This series is a response to the line ‘I Always Knew You’d Come Back...’.
‘I Always Knew You’d Come Back...’ explores the relationship between the viewer and the viewed (a theme which links all my work). The images are concerned with the possibility of the ‘non-portrait’ and the notion that the subject might repel the gaze of the camera and the viewer. The figures each holding a torch that shines into the lens and conceals their full identities, and the process by which the viewer may read the portrait for information about the subject is disrupted by the flare of light. Instead the viewer is captured in the torchlight that bursts from the image.
These constructed and fictitious scenarios place the figures in their own homes or gardens, allowing the viewer to build a partial narrative from their surroundings, whilst also drawing on their own pre-conceived filmic clichés of storytelling. These ambiguous images act like film stills, as if the viewer has watched only one scene in the middle of a film and must image the outcome.
The images encourage an escapist fantasy, a narrative that exists only in the imagination of the viewer and suggests a storyline that surrounds the image, past and future.