From Afar 2008 - 10

Regularly roaming the Internet, I would watch streams from webcams all round the world, but most frequently a sidewalk camera in central New York, which offered the delight of ‘people watching’ 24/7 in a busy, frenetic city. Whenever a particular moment caught my attention, I would take a screen shot.

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These screen shots formed the base material for the From Afar series. Cropped extremely tightly to create a large, low-resolution collection of anonymous passers-by’s faces, they were eventually edited down to  forty-five that appear in a book, ten of which have been reproduced at 85 x 85 cm size and exhibited.   

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Once enlarged, these portraits acquire an aesthetic all of their own. Distorted through pixellation and the exaggerated blocks that are an effect of JPEG digital compression, the subject gains a quality that no longer corresponds with its original form. Unlike in traditional portraiture, identity is lost; faces often appear skull-like, exposing the Gothic in the everyday. Yet, from these hazy features, familiar faces uncannily begin to arise. My intention for these frames, extracted from the continuous blinking eye of the webcam, is to reference, yet simultaneously subvert, the rich history of photographic portraiture, street photography, and the snapshot.

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Webcams are often perceived as having either a voyeuristic or an oppressively surveillant function; however, this is a limited view. Many of these images illustrate the shifting nature of the surveyed and the surveyor; the majority of the people portrayed are actively engaging with the webcam, appropriating it for their own means, and, in doing so, challenging the panopticon paradigm so frequently associated with these cameras. These subjects actively engage with and perform for the camera. As they pose for the voyeurs in cyberspace (among them their friends whom they've contacted by mobile phone), as if for holiday snapshots, the lines between the private and the public become blurred.