Poses

In their own space, natural light, no staging, my friends have posed nude for me, but only because I have promised to remove their eyes. Cut into the negative, the source image has been destroyed, and a certain privacy seemingly protected.
Faced with the camera and my eye in the viewfinder, they direct their own bodies, flesh that they mould and perform for the lens, for an audience, for themselves, maybe as per the unconscious recollection of hundreds of years of female nudes in art history, in fashion, glanced in magazines and on museum walls.
When the eyes are gone, how do we read these women, exposed yet protected, tense yet defiant, who perform their bodies for us?

Poses was exhibited at the Royal College of Art graduate Show 2009.
Awarded the Carl Garnham Prize for Photographic Media.