Royal Wedding

My current research is regarding domestic spacial habitation and particularly alternative engagements within domestic space. I had previously been looking at power relations and iconization, but my work started to take me in other directions and the best thing to do is to follow in the direction my practice was going.

I had been looking at the farcical aspects of iconization in portraits of the Queen, Charles and Diana and Simon Cowell that you have seen on this blog previously.

‘we know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash . . . A photographs meaning lies not in its origin but its destination’ - adapted from Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author”

I moved into looking at invading private space. I came across a book printed in 1947 called ‘Royal Wedding’, it documented the life of Queen Elizabeth and her wedding to Albert. I was interested in the details contained in the book. Some of the content was quite invasive.

Heres some quotes of the text I found interesting, ‘Should the Princess’s wedding day be selected as the first post-war occasion to restore to Britain the traditional gaiety of a gala public event’

‘The queer thing about ‘public figures’ is the more fiercely the light beats upon them the less ‘real’ they become to those who read about them and see their photographs almost daily in the newspapers’

I have ‘stolen’ the images from the book and obscured them. In being rephotographed, they are removed from their context and given the potential for virtually unlimited displacement. They are rephotographed at awkward angles, the result is at times are disorienting. A new image is created distinct from the original. The subject in the photograph (some) have been given anonymity through the process of rephotographing. By being taken the image becomes similar to an anonymous memory. The characters are removed from the context they are intended and in effect are making a refusal to conform to the purpose they were originally intended. They have been stripped away from the text that surrounded them.