Oliver Collins

There is something necessarily haunting about photographs. A photograph is a captured loss, a memento mori entombed in its frame. However, this haunting too is an immortality, a state of interbeing with the potential for narrative eternal. Under this light a photograph is rhizomatic - always in the middle, between things, reclaiming vitality in the moment of observation.  

Within my work, the camera has presented a grievance. It poses a dilemma that has forced an interrogation of my core concerns surrounding the performative event. For me, the liminality of the live is the potential of performance. With that in mind, I feel something is always lacking in the experience of performance as photographs – something vital has been lost.  

That said, I produce the occasional work where photographic documentation is a necessity. Such works occur at sites where the likelihood of an audience is limited, thereby forcing me to concede to the camera. Upon it I impose a strict set of rules: Hold still. Maintain a fixed distance. Keep silent. However, as stringent as my rules might be, such works always resist control. In a sense I have already come to terms with the loss of such works before their actuation, accepting that they will now exist as death masks – idealised frozen images of an ungraspable, opaque past.  

Yet from these points of departure unforeseen sights can emerge - chance encounters that come to define the work’s posthumous existence, whilst revitalising its body through narrative veins. Now, in turbulent times and in attempts to (re)construct the present, these are the images I find myself drawn towards. Images with their full figure residing on the edge of vision; images offering some funny little hope; absurd and impossible images haunted by a present absence, glimmering on the periphery.