SARAH AINSLIE
sarah ainslie is a documentary photographer who works with communities and groups. her subjects have included south african women paired in an exhibition with women from kent, the visually impaired, mentally challenged and poor. she takes classical portraits and displays them alongside material from family albums andimages taken and made by the subjects themselves – using disposable / regular cameras and/or fotogrammes. by using old material as a base material and digitally planting a newer portrait on it, likes to create a past-present parallel. she has also used projections to create portraits including differing subject matter – such as the area or home of the subject.
although she noted her projects to be continuous, she seemed to be a bit pseudo-emphatic. it reminded me of the boom of so-called documentarians that came about when flash was introduced and pictures could be taken with little effort in low light. to me the work lacked focus or attention.
most of her images are done on a mamiya rb67 (she reminded us of this often) and black and white film, as the images the subjects made are on colour film. this brings to mind a confrontation of the two sets of images – on one hand her black and white image which has calculated lights, classic crop and sharp quality thanks to the larger negative which is shown as a single image and on the other her subjects’ images arranged(edited by ainslie) to a collage and shown in multitude, thus belittle’ing their significance. this way i see she creates a strong juxtaposition between the two – which may seem just as differentiating herself from the commoner as a professional photographer (using a larger format is understandable, but a documentarian deciding for b&w for aesthetic value only is questionable).
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