Watching, I Am Watching You, Caught

Watching
A dark, square-shaped image gives way to a view of a woman. Her heightened alertness expressed by subtle gesture, caused by something we don’t see generating an atmosphere of suspense, creating an image of something we might have seen before. The women are caught in a moment of raised awareness. Something unfamiliar seems to be going on. The photographs depict the moment just before the women realize what is happening – the moment of highest tension. I stage situations which female viewers may recognize as if they have experienced them themselves, though in many cases their experience is limited to the virtual reality of movies and TV. The gaze in my photographs is an important tool to create a narrative and question the viewer’s notion of looking and watching.

I Am Watching You
Three young women in profile depicted in a style that references 17th century portrait paintings appear to be trying to catch somebody’s gaze. Without moving their heads they try to detect who is gazing at them. They struggle to see yet not turning their heads; they hold the gaze yet avoiding to be noticed. I Am Watching You refers to Watching. The women in I Am Watching You go one step further and address the voyeur/viewer by holding the gaze at the camera.
The title I Am Watching You addresses both the implied voyeur in the image/viewer of the image who looks at the women and the woman who is about to detect the implied voyeur/viewer. By gazing at the viewer the women challenge the viewer and force him or her to reflect on his or her own activity of looking: What or who am I looking at – and who is looking at me?

Caught
In each photograph the viewer sees a group of two or three women in different situations. One of the women appears to start to be aware of something or somebody and starts to gaze at the camera/the viewer – the intruder of the scene. A closer examination of the camera’s point of view shows that the position of the camera is either too high or too low to be a human’s point of view, though it still could be a person crawling towards them or looking down from a tree. Still the slightly odd viewpoint leaves the viewer with a strange feeling that it might not be the gaze of a human being – her or his – but rather “its” gaze. I call this a depersonalized implied gaze. It lends an uncanny feeling to the photograph, as the viewer can’t tell who or what may be watching the women, or, conversely, who or what might the women be looking at.