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Roland Barthes describes a distinct change that takes place when he knows he is being photographed: ‘Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’.1 In his recent exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art, ‘Pictured’, Matthew Sleeth explores this process of photographic transformation. For each of the twelve large colour photographs in ‘Pictured’, Sleeth has photographed people either taking photographs or being photographed. Vernacular photographies are the focus of the exhibition, but they are examined with a twist. By photographing the photographic events, rather than showing us the resultant photographs, Sleeth shifts our attention to the ways in which our experiences and memories are shaped in our relations to vernacular photographies.
To Sleeth, vernacular photographies mirror our social and personal priorities. As amateur photographs are generally taken to celebrate a person or an event, they work to catalogue our values and desires. Whether it is in the way that we pose for family snapshots (remaking ourselves as a familial ideal for the camera), or construct selective narratives in family and travel albums, our photographs speak to how we would like to see ourselves and how we wish to be perceived by others.
‘Pictured’ highlights how the act of taking photographs also has become a kind of shared ritual. In Untitled #32 [Kawaguchiko], 2005, a group of people gathers in the cold by Lake Kawaguchi, Japan, in search of the perfect photograph. Lake Kawaguchi is a favourite spot for amateur photographers who come together to take in the beauty of Mount Fuji through their