Marian Drew/Bruce Muirhead
The photograph is a document, a fragment of time caught and presented to an audience as a means of representing reality. For many the taking of these documents is a ritual, a confirmation that this happened and I was there.
The press photograph, the holiday snap, Dad holding the baby and the lovers dining are all photographs used in this way and looked at as reminders of the real Marian Drew's photograph is also meant to be looked at in this way, although there is nothing about it that suggests the documentation of a reality, particularly when seen m its original, quite dramatic colour. Rather it is a surrealist profusion created by long exposures and the moving of lights and objects before the lens.
In this sense the photograph is a document for everything recorded on the film happened, and in as much as this is the case what we see as the final photograph is the documentation of a ritual enacted for the camera.
Before opening the shutter, Drew collects objects which she then uses as props that become throw-away junk after the image is created. She doesn't carefully pre-plan the images, however but simply takes them into the selected situation and interacts with them according to the promptings of her unconscious.
In this instance the situation is her own house, at a time when a wall was being removed to make way for a door, into which she took the props previously selected for the ritual of creation. For Drew, however, the ritual is not the release of the shutter, as it is for most "still" photographers, but the playing with shadow, light and shapes.
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