Portfolio

Brian Gibson

Photography has always played an important role in my practice as an artist.  An area I have been working in is with inherited images/old family photographs that have been passed down to me.  I have studied and worked with these images that are a visual record of my family, their history and their relationships with people in their environments.  Using digital software, I have been able to take people from these photographs (some known, some unknown) and re-set them into new and different environments, that is, environments that I inhabit and which I photograph.  My aim is to produce images that have both a rich visual and emotional content and which explore the relationship between time, place, photographer and subject.

 

The process of taking people from their original environment and putting them into a new setting creates a shift from their original identity which, in part, has been defined by time and place.  I see this method of reconstructing the image as a way of revealing archetypal characteristics, the people in the new images remain themselves but are also given an identity that can be viewed as universal, the work is then titled accordingly (The Child, The Mother, The Father, The Rider, The Lovers etc).

 

The starting point for this work has been about making connections with the past, and then redefining that past.