My ideas around photography’s relationship to reality and truth have changed as my practice has evolved over time. For decades I was interested in a kind of journalistic approach making images about people, (living or in the case of R. Lenkiewicz, dead), through a desire to show it as it was: to photograph people within their natural environments, posed in a way which they felt celebrated them, whilst also appealing to my sense of aesthetics. Now things have changed.
I understand, it's all bollocks, from how you frame an image, what the photographer chooses to include or leave out of the frame; to how the image is disseminated, the contexts and politics applied to it, the fact, that in the age of digital, there is not even a way of knowing if the photographic proof was completely fabricated. I have removed myself from this entire debate.
In turning my camera on myself, I am set free from questions about truthfulness and instead want to make work which is more akin to story-telling than reality. Creating my work within the staged confines of my studio heightens this approach, now everything I photograph has been created to be photographed. This approach seems the most ethically profound one I can take.
Just me being me, natural and normal, nothing fake in this photograph...
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