Can I photography you?
I am interested in thinking about care as an aesthetic, choreographic and political practice. As a negotiation of constantly fluctuating needs, capacities and interests. I am particularly interested in care that is disengaged, hostile, reluctant or otherwise complicated and problematic.
Through this research I am examining the physical performances of care calling on knowledge from somatic dance, nursing and kink. As a thread to connect them I am looking at how people care for still, passive bodies.
I am approaching this research with the idea of configurations, which could refer to arrangements of elements in particular forms, or (in computing) to configuration files which create the initial settings for a computer programs, and sometimes provide tools to modify those settings.
“Hamish MacPherson is a performance artist and choreographer. Recently, he has delved into the practice of portraiture photography, photographing his friends and colleagues on film and his phone. His images carry on this feeling of performance through his interaction with his subjects that evokes the sense of ease that the person has with Hamish.”
Traia Photo Lab
STILL LIFE is an interview-led zine that delves into the worlds of care, choreography and kink to explore pleasure, passivity and power. It’s is about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.
My next and best taste of photography as an integral part of artistic collaboration (and not just the documentation of it) happened in May 2018. It was during a short, difficult and transformative residency that my friends/ colleagues Simon Ellis, Paul Hughes and I organised ourselves in Sardinia.
For the photographs one of us would be the subject and would pick a location in the building where we staying and working. The other two would then compose the scene, take lots of photographs and then select just one. We each took turns and did this three times over two weeks resulting in nine photographs.
“We took photographs of each other. At first, just an idea to get something going. Then, in a desire to mark what was happening to each of us, as we began to recognise that something was happening to all of us. Hundreds and hundreds of photographs: playful, absurd, dark, overexposed, hot, cold, blue, red, serious, melodramatic, out of focus, in focus; you get the idea.
We asked one another: what might this rather than that image mean to the person before the camera? How do we want to see them? What can they not see in themselves, not bear to see? As we were being photographed we thought: what will they see in me? Can they see what I want them to see, how I want to be seen? How do they want to see me? As we photographed we said: shift your position. I like him like that. It doesn’t look like him anymore. He looks so feminine. Are you comfortable? Can you take your shirt off? Do we need to try something else? Do you think we’ve already got it?”
In May 2020 I was asked to take over the Instagram account of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Derry. I used it as a chance to talk about recent work that I had done and other artists I am interested in.
Continuing the self portraiture I had been doing in 2020, I styled it as if the viewer was visiting my flat and hanging out for the day, an awkward mix of work and intimacy. It was during lockdown so self isolation was very much the theme of the world. I took a photo every two hours, following (or staging) different activities, outfits and moods.
