A video call can make you realise just how small an area you need to tidy. Move the laptop an inch to the left and you may have quite a different account of how the week is going.
It makes me wonder how much of a room we’d choose to leave in a portrait.
There’s a detail I like in a three-part still from Saodat Ismailova’s Stains of Oxus: someone washing their hair over a basin, beside images of a river and a wooden footbridge. The river is also part of an ordinary day. The 2016 work follows the Amu Darya and draws on the lives and dreams of people along its banks. It’s in Interflows, at ARTepa Gallery at Green University, through 15 December.
Saodat Ismailova, Stains of Oxus (2016), installation still. Production: Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing. Source: Le Fresnoy.
A familiar place can give a portrait that sort of interest. The kitchen table. A well-used workbench. A garden somebody has spent rather more time on than they care to admit. There’s plenty to notice without including every cable in the room.
Of course, the person who works in the workshop all week may want their photograph taken somewhere else entirely. Fair enough. They might be much happier in the garden.
I’d hate to spend the whole conversation asking about work and miss the chance to hear about the tomatoes.
