ABOVE THE CITY
This group of photographs picture scenarios that reflect the experience of contemporary urban life and not shy away from any uncomfortable subject matter that that might throw up. Some images within this group like Into the Desert I think of as quite politically engaged whilst others are like Red Room are deliberately awkward both visually and in terms of its sexual content. I would identify my approach in this group of works to that of realism in painting; though the images are attempting to talk about the way things are now they are not in the main naturalistic – they have a heightened quality which is the outcome of my working process. I often shoot and reshoot a single scenario becoming more involved as the process develops so that the image accumulates a certain kind of intensity.
In this group of works I was interested in referencing established genres of picture making as a way of negotiating closed and circular kinds of debate that can occur around the constructed photograph. By employing conventions of the traditional portrait, nude, still life and landscape I wanted to place my work in a larger context of the history of image making.
Thought about each piece like an individual story in a collection of short stories. Everything you need to know about its possible narratives is contained within the image but it is only through the interconnections of mood, tone, rhythm and overlapping visual details that a sense of real character and concerns of the group of works emerges.
Most of work set in urban context which is made more or less explicit in the work. The urbanness of the work for me is a way of establishing the work as inhabiting a broadly contemporary/ western/ modern world which is especially important with works that are socially engaged.
Exhibitions of these works have taken place at:
Sarah Dobai, Entwistle Gallery, London 2001 Above the City, Artists’ Space, New York 2002 Sodium Dreams, CCS Museum, Bard College, New York State 2002 Hyaward Gallery Turnaround Programme, 2001 Sarah Dobai, Films & Photographs Kettles Yard, Cambridge 2006