“…that’s all there is. And that’s all we ever know about anybody….light on surface.”

Gary Winogrand.

We all stand silently; figures with wires leading from our ears that are here in body only. Eyes covertly dart glances at each other as motionless forms stand in an early morning breeze. I sigh.

In the distance a bus appears and the stillness is broken as the forms are once more injected with life. At first it is only the most observant that begins to creep forward but then the forms swarm together in a huddle of bodies that jostle and collide. For the first time we are all connected. Yet each touch is received with suspicion as hands reach into pockets to check possessions and bags are pulled tight over shoulders. Someone taller and bigger than me pushes in front of me and I say nothing.

I find a seat on the top deck and stare blankly out of the window hoping that the seat will remain empty next to me as from beyond the safety of the glass I stare unseen at the fascinating figures below.

A weight lands next to me then pushes closer; their leg touches mine and I pull away then stop as I refuse to give ground to this interloper. They push up again, their body leaning against mine. I feel their weight and the sudden smell of their body odour that wafts from them. My head begins to turn towards them but stops only to return once more to the window and the performing figures below. I reposition the headphones in my ears and as the bus pulls away, on its way to carry me to work, the person next to me fades from thought.

The photograph allows us to turn our heads and to look. It allows us to safely see without being seen and once more the safety of the frame and the barrier of glass afford us the mediated connections of a dislocated world. Intrinsic to my works are the observations of contemporary urban existence and the inherent paradoxes found within the collisions, transactions and dislocations of the common place and the everyday.

As the urban environment swells in number the more we seem distanced from those around us and the more we seem to retreat into the isolation of ourselves. Perhaps though if atomistic societies, such as the one in which we exist, consider “interpersonal relationships outside of the nuclear family…with contention, suspiciousness and invidiousness”. (1). It is little wonder that some may wish to retreat from the physical presence of others.

Yet the paradox of this theory is that we are of course social creatures with a primordial need to interact and exist within groups - an instinct of course that is now more comfortably conducted through the mediated forms of technology such as the internet: Technology then, coupled with the safety of our private spaces, has become the filter, or glass, to alleviate anxiety as it denies and pacifies the anxieties, threats and risks of interacting with unknown others who inhabit the public spaces around us.

This is a work that aims to construct a framework of questions about our relationships with the unknown others who exist around us. My images, just like the strangers that we encounter within the everyday are both a mix of fact and fiction: a mixture of actuality and presumption.

The images, and of course the strangers who we encounter, become a series of tableaux that reveal more about us than the individual under scrutiny. My intention then is to raise questions about the hollowness of our urban identities and the performances of our public selves but ultimately of course to investigate the spaces in between mind and corporeality.

As you establish interactions and relationships, through acts of looking at these unknown others in my images, consider your relationship with the unknown others who you have encountered within your day. Consider too those who you are encountering within this venue and why you are looking and interacting with images of strangers behind glass and not with the real strangers who currently inhabit the same space as you now.

We are all connected and yet we are all separate. Whilst we look it perhaps is impossible to truly see the unknown others around us. As like us they find themselves posited between mind and corporeality; between the physicality of their existence and the individual they and we think they are. Yet, in the end of course, they like us will always be made real by how others choose to read the light upon their surface.

1. Peter A. Munch, Charles E. Marske
Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 158-171

Andrew Jackson