Artist Statement

I entitled my project "Voyeur Dating Service".  To come up with the project at large, I combined my photography experience, a lecture from class and an internet animation all into one.  In class, we listened to a recording on British airwaves of readings from personal ads.  I found them very funny, as some were extremely desperate, and others seemed to be almost a parody in themselves.  Afterwards, the class had a discussion about the ads.  Most of the class seemed to find them humorous, as did I.  During the recordings, I started thinking back on an animation I had seen called "Video Dating Service" by Dave Firth who I admire a lot.  This video is a 2-minute short in which a TV salesman talks about his eerie life living in a cardboard box.  As odd and disturbing as it is, it had the same sort of British comedy touch to it. I decided this video would be the benchmark to my project, and I would show it at the beginning of the presentation.  

Then I had to choose what medium to do my project in.  I instantly decided on photography which is my major at Columbia College.  Then after reading the project guidelines, I started thinking about identity and applying it to voyeurism, which we also studied in class.  The work of Sophie Calle was very interesting to me.  Sophie followed people around to unknowingly be photographed and even traveled great distances for the pictures.  I wanted to do something along those lines, but a little less personal and up-close.  Since I live at a busy intersection, I figured it would be convenient for me to take candid shots like Calle did, from the privacy of my bedroom.  Although I couldn't get some of the people in focus due to poor lighting outside, I think most of the shots turned out pretty good.

The project had an identity theme with a twist of comedy-I matched up each voyeur picture with a short and almost nonsensical personal ad for a dating service.  My prejudices of others came out in the project-for example I photographed a man in a camouflage outfit, and had his personal say "Looking for someone with a sense of discipline".  So obviously I've used prejudice in my project, because identity is something often directed by prejudices.  

The idea of the project was to use physical appearance against people, and it was all too easy.  The project should hopefully have people question their own prejudices of strangers.   I didn't attempt to make physical profiling a bad or good thing in my project.  It was more of a collaboration of the subjects and ideas of individualism and voyeurism (that were discussed in class).