Creative Lives Talks: Arabella Plouviez

I attended my second Creative Lives Talk this week featuring Arabella Plouviez and John Harrison, I will not be talking about John's work though as it was too techy for my comprehension, he talked in photography terms and I found it quite difficult to follow, however I have plenty of notes and lots to say about Arabella's talk which I found interesting considering I don't really do photography but the themes and contexts to her work grasped me.

Arabella started the talk with her photographs and an explanation of "A Perfect Society", a series of 15 works. This series traces the emergence of photographic identification and the increasing importance of the image within surveillance systems, working from an early history of prison photographs to the architecture of Durham Prison today. From what I understood from her explanation she would have conversations with inmates that were currently situated within Durham Prison, from these conversations she would use direct quotes to tell a story about their experiences and what it was like to be inside, living within a prison but she would keep all quotes anonymous. She would construct her photographic images often with text, she said she was interested in representation. The figurines she used were tiny but she blew them up to get great detail.

The next section Arabella moves onto was a series called "Connected". These were portraits of students sat in a chair looking down at there phones, looking away from the camera, these portraits explore the visual contradictions between the introspective pose and the access to all kinds of possibilities through there mobile phone. This works considers the shifts that occurs as we engage with a networked world and exclude ourselves from the physical environment in which we are, spending time with those we want to rather than those around us. I liked this section of the talk cause it reminded me of escapism, that distracting ourselves with our phones and getting caught up in social media that we completely forgot about what is around us. It was just a really interesting subject and idea, I cant quite explain why I found it interesting, just did.