I happen to come across the work by Natasha Caruana by accident. She did a series of work on bride selling their wedding dress after the wedding (Fairytale for Sale), married man looking for affairs (The Married Man), and women who have affairs with married men (The other women). Her website can be found here:
The topics are very interesting, however, the photographs are not so. If I would skip the description/text/insert to find the background of the story and just look at the photographs, it will make very little sense to me. Of course, in description note on “Married Men”, the artist was using a cheap deposable camera to avoid the “date” to find out her intention. As a result, the images are all grainy and with weird composition. Very often I was looking at the images and wonder why it shows cash with a bill. Then the explanation is the “married man” paid in cash to avoid his wife to find out anything on the credit card bill.
In my photography class we talked about composition, light, and colour. Very often we were taught to compose a visually strong image that show a concept or a colour combination, but I never come across a tutorial of composing something that makes little sense and have the audience to find it in the description page. Natasha Caruana’s work is not the only one. Zarina Bhimji’s work from the OCA study day last time is very similar: many of her photographic work are not visually strong, one has to rely on reading the background of the story, watching the short film and see everything connect together. No doubt both of them was presenting a very interesting subject. However, for most of us as a student, how likely to have someone to spend time looking through our work and reflect on it? Compare it to press photography, in which you might have only one image that make it to the front page (if you are lucky), and that image has to obviously point to a story all by itself, visually I prefer the press photo style of work.
Last but not the least, it begs another interesting question: if you have an idea that worth exploring photographically, but it might not meet the mainstream commercial sense. For amateur, we can do it for fun. For professional, who is going to fund your work?
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