DEANE CURTIN
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Today, visual experience is shaped far more by the weight of consumer culture than by critical investigation. Advertising, social media, the powerful seduction of wealth and power… all direct our attention to the world experienced as a commodity. Photography then acts as a system of mind control. It supports the most corrosive kind of seduction: the mere illusion of freedom.
Still, photography has the potential to encourage sympathetic attention to experience in those spaces between what our culture encourages to see. Photography can be a subversive art. I think of the girl in rural India who allows herself to be photographed, but her eyes are defiant. She resists. Neither the photographer nor the camera will capture her soul. Or, I think of the Tibetan school child holding a photo of a Tibetan monk who has self-immolated as a protest against Chinese colonialism, her trusting face filled with a sense of pained confusion about the world into which she was born.
I work in the tradition of personal documentary photography. For me, this means that the locations that attract me are found rather than created in the studio. I wander in a location until something I didn't expect to find begins to step forward. I use the camera in a way that doesn't attract attention to creativity for its own sake, or to the artist. The world itself is constantly creating as a place of liberation, if we will only investigate the spaces between...
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