On Embodiment
2026My background in ‘choreophilosophy’ and embodied thinking shapes my approach to photography in which the photographic encounter can matter more than the resulting image. I often work with friends, people who become friends through working together, or myself as a subject. Taking photographs becomes a way to spend time together, think together and try things out through moving, posing, touching and looking. Ideas develop between those involved, making photography a way of exploring bodies, relationships and ways of being together.
Showing embodiment
Photography, particularly when it tries to reveal ‘bodiliness’, often puts people in unusual states: holding still, enduring discomfort, exposing ourselves, twisting or losing control.
I’m interested in the gap between what happens while making a photograph and the image that remains. A photograph can show the visible surface of an event while losing much of what it felt like: its duration, effort, hesitation, consent, awkwardness, pleasure, and the relationship between the people involved.
I wonder if photography has also developed its own shorthand for embodiment: twisted bodies, close-ups of skin, bruises, nakedness, strain. At what point do these stop emerging from attention to a body and become things we seek out or manufacture because they look embodied?
Photographing people together
A lot of my work involves photographing people in relation to other people.
Sometimes that relation is very physical: touching, holding, grabbing, pushing or supporting someone. But an encounter doesn’t have to involve touch. It can mean sharing space, paying attention to someone, directing or being directed, or becoming aware of another person looking at you.
My series 36 Strategies developed from spending 36 minutes photographing one person. The photograph might preserve a fraction of a second, but I’m interested in the rest of that time too: talking, trying things, changing our minds, getting uncomfortable, laughing, stopping and starting again.
Sometimes the encounter feels more important to me than the photograph it produces. Photography becomes a way of spending time together and finding out what happens between people when making an image gives us something to do.
Museum choreography
Museums tell us what to do with our bodies. Some instructions are explicit: don’t touch, don’t cross this line, don’t take photographs. Others we seem to know without being told: walk, stand, look, keep your voice down, behave appropriately.
I became interested in these rules while working in museum front of house teams. You are always watching the bodies around you. Are people lost? Are they paying attention? Are they going to touch something?
At the same time, you are managing your own body: standing, pacing softly, looking open and available, adjusting discomfort, waiting and being ready to intervene.
I began thinking about this as a kind of dressage: the quiet training and regulation of bodies by the institution, including my own.
Working there also gave me a small amount of freedom to test those rules, making minor incursions into what the institution had already prescribed and choreographed.
Dismembering
A photograph can cut off a head, isolate a pair of legs, turn skin into a surface, or make a small part of someone stand in for a whole body. The frame decides what we see and what disappears.
I’ve used this a lot in photographs that play with sexuality and desire. Cropping, masking or hiding a body can make it anonymous or ambiguous. There is enough of a real person there to desire, but also a gap where you have to imagine the rest. Perhaps that gap is part of what makes it erotic.
There’s something about objectification and fetishism here. A leg, mouth, patch of skin, underwear or gesture can stand in for a whole person. But the partial body can also escape some of the ordinary reality of having a body. The awkward, mundane person disappears.
I’ve done this with my own body too: cropping it, blurring it, hiding parts of it, turning it into something I can look at or imagine differently. Maybe, in some small way, escaping the lumpish body I actually have to inhabit.
This is also where my art photography and more personal or sexual photographs start to blur. I’m not sure they are doing completely different things.
There’s a contradiction here I keep coming back to. Making photographs can involve being intensely present with another person and their body. But the photograph can then do almost the opposite: fragment that body, remove it from the encounter and turn it into something that exists only in the image.