Christine Jeffs
Somewhere Near
“We apprehend photographic images as ideas and embodiments of consciousness as much as we apprehend them through our sense of sight.”
The photographs in 'Somewhere Near' investigate the complex relationship between the photographer and subject. In this series I have photographed people, objects and landscapes which exist near me in a physical and a psychological sense. When photographed and viewed as an image, these everyday and often unobserved objects and places provoke questions about how we experience what we see.
Both landscapes and portraits open up a dialogue about what it is to look, and what it is to see. As Max Kozloff says, the ‘psychological reach and affective power’ of portraits are ‘linked to the centrality of subject in portrait experience’. To look directly at a subject and see beyond the surface, whether it be an object, landscape or person, is to see one ordinary moment balanced between decay and renewal. To photograph it is to still that moment of flux.
