Sarah Jones
27 October – 24 November 2002
Sarah
Jones’s latest selection of photographs use an even more minimal vocabulary
than her trademark blank portraits, moving her models out into the garden
and park at night. The contrast of the flash photography on the faces and
foliage in the foreground against the black backgrounds and barely visible
night skies give a dramatic contrast to the subject matter: individual
girls/women and the ‘natural’ landscape against which they are posed. The
trees, roses and hedges that form the backdrop are re-shot as still lives,
with the same emotional level maintained whether the focus is the delicate
colour of a withering rose bush, or the abrupt stare of a young girl framed
by a vaguely ominous forest. These portraits demonstrate Jones’s ability to
make her simple tableaux both elude to, and undermine, psychological and
cultural narratives. Here the clichés from the history of painting – woman
as nature, nature as the idealised opposite to culture or as nature morte –
are realised with such clarity as to undo the stereotyping, whilst retaining
the beauty and lyricism of the images. Each photo plays off the others, with
the only interior shot – a woman looking out of the window, away from the
viewer – hung next to the stark image of a rose bush. Linking the two
photographs is the rose pattern on the woman’s dress, knowingly juxtaposing
the artificial pattern with the ‘real’ picture of roses, inviting the viewer
come to the conclusion that the difference between the two is one of style
rather than reality.
Jones belongs to a group of photographers who came to prominence in the
mid-late nineties, spawning many imitators; attempting to embrace the
mundane, whilst hoping to access the uncanny. Where Jones manages to keep
the edge is in the tightness of her compositions, a stifling constriction of
gesture, dress and location that should be normal, ordinary, but manages to
catch the viewer with the repetition of motifs and hinted-at narratives. In
this series the park trees and backyard foliage become part of a twilight
landscape that intertwines the models and viewer in a partial fantasy that
is always held at arm’s length: after all, these are just photographs, the
girls are only models, and the atmosphere is just the flash bouncing off the
trees.
Catherine Grant