Sophie Barbasch
Saturday, 4 September 2010
Work from her oeuvre.
“In her statement for this body of work, Barbasch wrote:
I started this project to understand how three people could share the same emotional narratives and never see or speak to each other. Coming to terms with our separation has meant normalizing an inexplicable void… I hope to show that the idea of togetherness is hard to dismiss.
Sophie Barbasch’s new images, submitted here, are compelling fragments of a tale that has yet to be told; in fact one that may be indefinitely withheld from being spoken or fully shown. My choosing of the phrasing “fragment” is deliberate, because Barbasch’s intention is to provide us fragments of stories without the context for more; a point in a narrative that, by nature of her investigation, the whole of which is to remain obscured.
In viewing these images, I’m uncertain whether they are personal in the autobiographical sense that Come Home is personal to Barbasch, or whether they are slices of the impersonal personal, seen and taken from the lives of those who are strangers to the photographer. I suppose that ultimately it doesn’t matter which is which, but it is my suspicion that the new images are related to the older body of work by virtue of what is left unsaid both literally and in the frame; that the story we are being shown is only part of larger whole, and the privilege of omniscience is not granted to us, or even perhaps to the photographer wielding the camera, either.
From her statement on these more recent photographs:
These images track an ongoing sense of being without an owner, a context, or a map. They are about inscrutable communication and disrupted stories. I explore my failure to graft my experience onto a linear, predictable template, expressing my feelings by photographing shifting spaces and unpredictable, unprotected scenarios.
Barbasch has a gift for piecing out the startling or the unseen disquiet that, were we as attuned to it as she, we would probably find on the peripheries of all of our lives. It will be interesting and instructive to see whether and how far she can take disjointed splice narratives.” – Hey Hot Shot