MATTHEW KEENAN | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM | RETURN TO TIMES
The current obsession with selfies is an important starting point to my practice, this has developed into using self-portraiture to question society and the media’s influence on our lives.
These images are from a larger series, New Photographic Work for Men. The main themes of my research as I have produced this body of work have been Northern male identity and the interplay of gender roles, sexuality, and a person’s masculine/feminine balance. As I have come to understand, these ideas are culture and time specific, and are constantly evolving.
PROCESS AND THE SELFIE
Conceptually, the retro kit I use, and the black and white negatives provide a limited form of data capture. This reflects the descriptive systems still used to understand modern people. An example of this is ‘gay’, a catch all term which lacks nuance, and crudely bundles people together, regardless of the cultural differences and the varied desires of those categorised this way. In relation to the camera, it is important to expose the images onto negatives, as this creates the indexical link to the time the image was made, and more importantly, to the cultural understanding of the themes at that time and only that time. Ultimately, the work considers limitation, the limits of photography to portray a whole person and the hazards of using outdated terminology to describe or categorise people limiting their possibilities for ambition and desire.
The apparatus I use is important in a number of ways - both personal and conceptual. For the past two years I have been using a 1950’s large format camera, and I process the negatives and make prints at home. The 5x4 camera is a cumbersome process that requires an amount of control and stability to produce the desired images of myself. These are elements I feel my life lacked before I came out in my late 20’s, and gained as I started to express myself through photography.
The large format camera requires that the user goes into a thoughtful space to visualise the images and their possible meanings before the images are made. It is with photography more than anything else that I become calm and methodical, so control of the whole process is important for me.
