How does one capture the essence of a place, its atmosphere, its rhythms, its materiality and the subtle visual language through which it reveals itself? The question feels especially relevant in a digital age when places serve as mere backgrounds for selfies and people’s focus too often seems mis-placed on simply memorialising their own presence within it.
Scrolling through an archive of images taken over nearly a decade and across continents, from sand dunes to icebergs, from the shores of a volcanic island to the summit of rugged mountains, from dense forests to urban jungles, I noticed a pattern and consistency in focus. Despite the diversity of subject and geography, my lens deliberately emptied spaces of people gravitating towards the "architecture" of a place through a multiplicity of photographs isolating surfaces, textures, patterns, forms and spatial details that together constituted the material vocabulary of a landscape whether natural or built. The images began to reveal themselves as visual fragments of a greater composition.
And so was born the MISES EN SCÈNE series, a body of work conveying the essence of a place through a staged composite narrative. The name was borrowed from the lexicon of theatre and cinema which describes the orchestration of all elements essential to storytelling like casting, spatial positioning, and narrative flow. In the series, each location is presented as a grid installation of up to twelve photographs carefully staged, sequenced and juxtaposed to create many layers of visual dialogue while collectively constructing an experiential portrait of the place. The connections between images function like Eisenstein's theory of montage, where meaning is generated in the collision between one image and the next. Whereas Bernd and Hilla Becher used grids and repetition to expose difference within sameness, here grids and juxtaposition are used to reveal the many facets of a singular place.
The installations function as a form of visual montage where echoes of form, colour, and texture contrast or mirror each other from one image to the other. It’s the visual network of relationships they create which allows viewers to perceptually fully experience the place. The MISES EN SCÈNE series proposes that the identity of a foreign place emerges through the resonance of a multiplicity of perspectives. The same is true of people from different cultures than ours who we can only understand, judge and appreciate after careful considered comprehensive observation.