A STRANGER PLACE (2010)

20h x 30w archival pigment prints, edition of 3.

In late 2008, faced with diminished work opportunities after the Great Recession, I accepted a sub-contract photographing hotels in a re-branding advertising campaign.

I found myself alone, in rooms normally filled with travelers, vacationers, families, business people, and hotel workers. Spaces of public function—banquet halls, conference and meeting rooms, fitness rooms and pools—dictated behavior. I was no longer accountable to those functions; I existed outside. I responded by expressing that freedom corporeally and with constructed narrative, for no one but the camera.

A Stranger Place explores elements of performance, surprise, and transgression. Working covertly in these spaces that were made available to me, I questioned their nature. I responded to what each empty room posed with practices of play, conjuring, call and response. I photographed the rooms as I would for the hotel’s marketing division. They are processed for online advertising standards—somewhat retouched, somewhat beautified. They are simple fictions—sometimes lacking sprinklers, electrical sockets, perhaps stains or peeling paint. Insertion of the performing body into these spaces heightens the fiction. They become a stage.