JACQUELINE FELSTEAD – I AM HERE
2013-08-12These portraits are of the residents of the notorious Gatwick Private Hotel. Here self-conscious residents stand with a blanket covering their face and upper body, standing as photographers themselves used to when they stood under a black cloth to better see through the camera lens. The hotel owner states: ‘Most [residents] keep to themselves, stay in their room or go about their business without bothering anyone…Most of the residents you wouldn’t know existed.’
Anonymity and invisibility are harbingers of social inequality in a contemporary culture that increasingly relies upon visual representation. To be invisible is to disappear. Yet to be photographed is to have ones image join a network of images, the reading of which is usually beyond the power of the subject to direct.
Exhibition runs through till September 7th, 2013
West Space
Level 1, 225 Bourke Street
Melbourne, Vic, 3000
Australia
