Georgia Graham is an artist from Victoria, Canada, currently based in Montreal where she is completing her BFA in photography at Concordia University. Her practice includes photography, video, performance and sound, and often explores the subject-artist relationship, identity, agency and self. She is the founder and co-curator of Magic Lantern, an annual photography show, and the Art Director for The Void Magazine, a bilingual literary and visual arts magazine.
Sightlines
I consider my photographs to be collaborative portraits. The purpose of this approach is to work directly against the historically problematic gaze in portraiture photography. I am aware and wary of the vulnerable positioning and imbalance of power as an artist photographing people and I work to subvert this dynamic. I photograph people close to me; I believe there is a sense of trust and empathy that comes across in an image when the photographer knows and cares about their subject.
Sightlines is both a formal and personal exploration of the agency of the photographed subject. The work incorporates conversation and exchange with the people I photograph. Often I will ask a subject to send me their own self-portrait and I use that as the spark that inspires the portrait I take of them. Other times the process involves talking together about the themes I’m considering, a conversation which informs the resulting photograph. I work intuitively with the goal of capturing something authentic. I encourage the people I photograph to share something of themselves, in an attempt to show them as they wish to be seen.
To view more of Georgia Graham’s work please visit her website.