Ordinary photography
What is it about this group of works by John Lethbridge and John Young that separates them from other photographic works? What makes them "ordinary", and by so declaring, implies their difference? Perhaps their conformation is determined by the conventions of portraiture and of the photographic installation. This "commonplaceness" is, by its very emphasis, what situates these works' concerns away from the prosaic.
On entering the exhibition space one is confronted by, not one, but several visages which stare out almost melancholically at the viewer: John Young 's Ultimate Entombments. These forms, recognizable as portraits (or at least as images constructed with that history in mind), are denuded of any reference to the individuality of those portrayed; they are presented simply as visages, and the works are thereby vacated of most of the characteristics of the genre. For John Young, this evacuation of personal referents indicates a concern with a conception of the "general"; the general as a mode of allusion to an "ideal form". We see the form of the work first, before we see the particulars about it. We see the portrait, the sign, the instant before we see the represented face. This indicates the influence of a Platonic idealism, the hypostatization of forms: a conception of "forms" as being capable of independent existence, as givens.
Through this assumption we are led to believe that images are signs which are instruments of the forms of things, replacing the concept of language as being an element of the thing itself. Unlike this notion of instrumentality, John Young's photographs do not act as indexical signs. They do not state: "this person", but, "person". In their concern for generality, these pictures