o b s e r v a t i o n s . . t h i n g s . . p e o p l e & i d e a s . .

Free Range graduate exhibitions at The Old Truman Brewery until 21st July.

See events calendar here.

The exhibition for the Photography graduates opened last night with some impressive work from the University of Westminster. See Sarah Chamberlain’s project below..

Sarah Chamberlain, University of Westminster

life guards, 2007

The series, Life Guards, investigates psychological representations of boredom and social detachment. Utilising photography and video installation this series is a survey of lifeguards observing pool activity, waiting for a scenario we hope will never happen. While the lifeguards are doing their job, their ‘looks’, framed before the camera, often appear detached from their surroundings and lost in their own internal worlds unobtainable to those around them.

As a portrait series Life Guards illustrates the ongoing predicament of the portrait photographs inability to communicate the ‘whole’ of a person. Instead their state of being and their represented form are defined by a predetermined scenario of observing from the confinement of a chair and of being confined in front of a camera.

Essentially ‘guardians of life’, the subjects ironically portray an internal psychological state, resembling boredom that, we as viewers, cannot touch. This irony is further parodied when we consider Barthes1 description of the photograph as ‘little deaths’ – a deceased moment in time .