Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday 11-17
FEBRUARY 3RD UNTIL 18TH MARCH, 2007
The Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen is proud to present the english photographer Henry Bond, who with an energetic voyeuristic approach to the medium, is a central figure in contemporary British photography. Bond is a long time user of an easy-going snapshot aesthetic that contains erotically charged elements.
Bond’s major bodies of work ‘The Cult of the Street’ and ‘Point and Shoot’ focus on everyday aspects of city life and are layered with elements of popular culture as much as they reference the history and theory of photography.
The passing glimpse, the unregarded moment, the intrusive snapshot, the clichéd pose, the “decisive photographic moment” or a studio portrait, are some of the themes constantly explored in Bond’s work.
His work is very much about the quotidian, and how the banal is transformed into something glamorous by the camera, and how the behaviour of those in front of the lens changes depending on their awareness of the gaze upon them.
Bond’s pictures often have a paparazzi feel to them coupled with the fact that he also uses telephoto lenses to enhance the voyeuristic aspect.
Henry Bond’s latest opus, “Forensic Series” continues his investigation into the codes of photography and his interest in psychoanalysis, with new emphasis on the Freudian uncanny.
Each image is a re-photographed detail of original crime scene documentation held in the British National Archives. These close-ups catalogue the banal details of day-to-day life in 1950s England.
A coffee tin or wallpaper pattern seem strangely familiar, perhaps not from personal experience, but rather a remembrance of film or other visual motifs from popular culture.
The scenes have a stillness and banality which is unsettling – through their familiarity, they enter our unconscious, but within these images of domesticity lies an interruption of the quotidian.
Each of the seemingly benign details is actually part of a larger scene, a room or space, in which a corpse is present. It is upon this realisation that an uncanny doubling occurs – a reappraisal of the image and its signification. Coming back to the photo again, we read it differently; a lurking unease emerges.
Bond’s ‘Interior Series’, which is also represented in the show, is cinematic in style, is informed by Lacanian theory and explores ideas around the gaze and voyeurism. Each photograph is a glimpse into a private residence in the Kensington area of London, and the images of daily routine are poignant and resonant. In this series, the subjects studied are unaware that they are being watched, and the images of them captured in moments of supposed privacy are telling insights into what it is to exist in the ‘Symbolic’ order.
Henry Bond (*1963) is born in London where he lives and works.
Educated in the 80’s at Surrey Institute of Art and Design and Goldsmiths College, University of London.
He is represented in numerous international collections, the London Tate Gallery and Photomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland among others.
The exhibition is arranged by the Emily Tsingou Gallery, London in co-operation with the artist and has received support from the British Council, Copenhagen.
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