Lindsay Seers

The Act of Photographing (with the mouth)

Act of photographing with the mouth, 1997-2005.

This collection of works concentrates on the act of photographing and the photographer (the event) rather than the object of the photograph itself. The works span a number of different themes but principally they reference the mouth camera as a sterile kiss – whereby the kiss becomes a mechanism of capture in which the sensuality and affection associated with an actual kiss is reduced to a ritual whose sole intentions is to take possession (control of a moment – a kiss of death; an image). So the act of photographing itself becomes an image here – a hollow staged kiss both for a camera and as a camera; the event has taken over its product (the photgraph).

To make this camera kiss is less than pleasant, drooling and gagging on the poisonous paper and trying to hold it in place whilst struggling with the sack. This stripping back of an event into an image is the condition of the photograph.

In one set of works a man and a woman photograph each other with their mouths, they never touch but consume one another remotely. Each covering themselves in a black sack, they emerge and ingest the image of each other in a monsterous exchange (using the mouth as a camera is not pretty and the reultant images are distorted by the buckled paper as it is crammed into the mouth cavity).

It is worth noting that even when we form our lips into the shape of a kiss we create an apeture in our body through which an image passes – so that the lover is falling onto the back of our throats, inverted, in a nosedive towards our guts. Even if we don’t capture this moment before it blacks out as the mouths meet, its trace was certainly there.