The aim of my project is to share my own experience with a long distance relationship and hope to share the struggles and the ways in which we cope with being apart for months at a time through the medium of photography. Photographing a loved one has been done many times over in the history of photography, with many different reasonings for it. To share intimate moments like Sally Mann does with her husband Larry in her series Proud Flesh. Or to display the beauty and trust in a relationship as seen in Sian Davey’s Martha. I believe that for me an important part of the art of
photography is being able to work and share alongside those most important to you. Last year I worked alongside my family in a series called A Feminist Manifesto a Generational Perspective, and now I work with my boyfriend, Lee, in a new series with a current working title of Significant Him. For this project I am taking images from moments shared with my boyfriend, showing through photography the moments we get to share not so often due to the long distance. Being long distance I have had to make the most of our time together. I have found that working alongside Lee has changed how I view my photographs and gives me a sort of confidence in them, it reminds me of an extract that I’d read that it provides a new found respect for the artwork of a partner, “Kahio’s and Rivera’s reverence for each other’s art was a powerful bond”.
I have been photographing myself and my boyfriend with the key theme of absence and have tried to communicate these themes with the use of our bodies, not only that but with part of me being physically absent from the images. I wanted to try and communicate me leaving and being separate from him at university but still holding onto him and reaching out for him, even when I am not physically there.
Ethically again due to the use of an identifiable individual I have had to consider with great thought how I am to navigate this project, I have asked myself questions about visual limitations, how comfortable is Lee showing his face and body? Is he comfortable sharing something so intimate with the world? Am I? Considering these questions I reached a conclusion that he and I are both happy to share my work, as we feel that it is an important message visually and metaphorically.
I think portrait photography is significant especially when a subject is key to the project. For me there was no other way to communicate the emotions of a person/s without having said in the images themselves. I thought it was important that Lee was the main representative of this as he is the key subject of my work. I have explored picturing my own body but felt this needed to be directed at him. It has also become an apparent reassurance in a way of our feelings for one another, when I first mentioned to him my project he was ecstatic.
When displaying my work I have been at war with myself as to what I want. For my current exhibition I have printed two large scale portraits however I wonder, is this the right display for my work? I have thought about making the work more personal, having smaller prints, framed like in a family home. I have decided I would like to make the work a series of images and I think that these would look better on a smaller scale as they are more intimate. I recently saw the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Glen Ligon at the Guggenheim and the series on ‘Notes on the Margin of the Black Book’ based on
Mapplethorpe’s ‘The Black Book’ the ninety one print series is combined with seventy eight accompanying texts is breathtaking, I am wanting to do something that pays homage to this. I would like a series of images of Lee and maybe myself included in these accompanied alongside notes and poems written either by us or ones we have identified as significant to us or our relationship.
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