Surveillance

I'm drawn to Cheryl Sourkes series Homecammer. These images of private video cams broadcasted publicly were not meant to be works of art. Sourkes describes webcams as "portals to inaccessible places...[they] constitute a portrait of comtemporary culture, one that interrogates the more readily available, popular media versions."

These images are dark, a bit eerie and creepy, a comment on the human condition, how seemingly private situations are now short google search away.The reasons these videos were streamed vary, but they were not meant to be art, none of these videos were composed to display beautiful compostions, none of these videos were meant to document an event or say something significant, they were merely used to talk to someone else (or maybe they weren't exactly talking...) the juxtaposition of making these images into (quite intriguing) photographs is very interesting to me. In a way, it reminds me of pictoral photography, the blurred focus and painterly feelings each one gives. In pictoral photography, photographers used a soft focus to make the photograph resemble a painting, thus easing the transition to photography as fine art. Here, the blurred quality of these images references fine art and distances you from the shock of what some of these subjects are engaging in. This idea of taking something people overlook - a dingy still from a webcam - and making it into something else is interesting.