Ryan Campbell

My initial project in portfolio one was a meditation on the self, on commodification, on the absurd hyper-reality of digital spaces, and broadly, on narcissism. Where does one go, then when the concept of the self in the self-portrait has been so thoroughly explored and exaggerated? One begins to ask how a portrait functions, and specifically what a self-portrait says about the photographer themselves. To shoot self-portraits and deny the typical informative and visual function in a photograph forces the viewer to expand their conception of portraiture. How little can this image say about its subject? How divorced from the self can a photograph be and still retain its taxonomic definition of self-portraiture? The sheet here carries weight as a bearer of meaning and object of projection. Its inclusion is owed to Teju Cole who struck me with the simple statement, “...the sheet on the floor becomes Death itself.” (On Photography, pg16). “Death” as a proper noun was loaded conceptually it seemed. The sheet, in its surreality, had taken on the very personification of an abstract idea. Who then, was the sheet when subjected to my own perception? What started as a self-consciously tropey spin on a sheet ghost began to take on a life of its own, and the work began to ask where the object ends and the person begins. What, in the end, is the subject of this body of work, what are we permitted to know about them, and what are we unable to know?

Of course, the primary text for the conception of this project comes from Teju Cole and their writing on surreality. They seemed convinced of a sort of fakeness inherent to staged images aping the “surreal” and their tipping over the edge of weird into “otherness” and losing that careful balance. I found myself compelled to push against the boundaries of Coles’ definitions of “surreal” and “other” and see what a collection of staged photographs could do to capture that feeling of the surreal while remaining self-conscious of their own artifice. Simple visual and conceptual influences are David Lynch, Gabrial Garcia Marquez (magical realism, yes, but a valuable source of inspiration), and contemporary photographers Benoit Paille and Leiko Shiga. The politics of representation are a deeply fraught issue in the contemporary art space, and this work in that context makes statements about how much work a photograph even does in representing a person, and questions its power as a tool of understanding or experiencing others