Disrupting Social Contracts Through Portraiture

This paper is in support of the artwork created during the MFA program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and as such will be focusing on encounters with ‘strangers’ through the ‘act of photography’. This essay will discuss the notion of the ‘stranger’ in relation to staged ‘photographic acts’, that attempt to trouble the boundary between the ‘public’ and ‘private’. I offer a brief outline of the notion of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ by citing authors such as Hannah Arendt and Kio Stark, who question the history and its modern understanding of these two social spheres through their analysis of social behaviour. Social contracts, the unspoken and unwritten rules informing our everyday interactions in the public, will be challenged through photographic interventions that expose social conventions and expected behaviour, in relation to the ‘stranger’. Through the use of the camera, as well as the use of self-imposed rules, I outline how the ‘act of photography’ can play with the performed norms and interpersonal relationships in the public space. My aim is to both disrupt and reveal -- i.e. ‘make visible’ -- these normative practices of public behaviour. Importantly too, my aim is to reveal the subject’s vulnerability. Vulnerability plays a central role in my practice, and acts as a way to penetrate the boundary people build around themselves in public situations. That is, their ‘masks’ or ‘public face’, so to speak. The aim of my research is to trouble the hidden social contracts that determine normative social behaviour in the public space and make them visible within the photograph, either through portraits that take on the form of still photographs or video. This essay will discuss the trajectory of my projects, alongside artists and theorists, while highlighting the use of photography and portraiture as central to my practice.