Examples of relay in contemporary photographic practice include Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself and Sophy Rickett’s Objects in the Field.
Calle’s work Take Care of Yourself [1] was a very personal piece where the subject was a break up email she received from her boyfriend. As an artist she decided to show it to other women, photograph them reading it, and accompany that with text of their critique’s of the email and boyfriend based on their profession.
Calle says this isn’t about a vendetta but I think it is hard not to see it as that. The social and political aspect is very interesting in that it focusses on women and their professions rather than them being seen, for example, as victims of broken relationships.
It is a postmodern piece as the images are all very similar but the textual perspective of the profession is the variant here. The viewer has to bring their own thoughts and feelings to bring the project to life. The story is not clear by the images alone.
The question that I haven’t yet answered is whether this works as a photographic project. Photography is not really the primary element here, it is the email text. It is also notable that Calle sought only the opinion of women. As a conceptual artist why did she choose photography?
Maybe the answer can be found in the writing of David Hurn (1997) who discusses the difference between a photographer and someone who has an interest in photography. He says that the person who becomes a photographer is not interested in photography as an end result but uses photography to pursue an interest in something else.
Sophy Rickett’s Objects in the Field [2] is also a collaboration. This time it results in a clash with an astronomy professor Dr Roderick Willstrop. This is not a personal project, it is a scientific process based project looking into the comparable attributes of photography and astronomy. Being a scientist, Dr Willstrop didn’t see the value in the artists work but was happy for her to use negatives that he was archiving from his telescope experiments.
Rickett’s had seen the project as a way of conveying the overlap of the two subjects, using the images as the connecting theme. In fact the project became about the differences between the art world and the scientific world and the different types of people in it.
References:
Martyn Rainbird 