Art

What is ‘Peep’ about?

They show women getting dressed and undressed in changing rooms in a series of sports centres. They’re very grainy images shot with a fish eye lens so that they resemble surveillance photographs. People tend to assume that the photos are taken by a man because the nude has traditionally been seen as a male subject but they’re not only about the difference between the male and female gaze. The viewer also feels uncomfortable because they’re images that you’re not supposed to see, so it’s also about the difference between public and private space; I want the viewer to question what they’re looking at and think about whether it’s okay to look at a private image, just because it’s being shown in a public space.

Do you want people to know whether the images were taken covertly?

I’m happy for it to be left ambiguous. If they don’t know about the project, most people will assume that the photographs were genuinely taken covertly. Whereas I did get permission from the venues and they are all women I know. I just asked them to do whatever they would normally do in a changing room if they were getting ready to go swimming. I was standing on stepladders and benches to get the kind of aerial view I needed. Feature continues

Well, initially I did actually try and take undercover photographs using a camera hidden in a bag but the images were all too dark and I couldn’t get the results I wanted. If they had been usable, I’m not sure how I would have then felt about showing them. But what I realised was that whether the images were genuine or not wasn’t really important; what mattered was that they could be perceived as genuine.

What’s your next photographic project going to be?

It’s very much in the very early stages but I’m back in women’s changing rooms, in venues like Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. This time however, it will be actual documentary shots - of women performers from London’s burlesque scene. Again they will be very grainy images but with a different ambiguity in that they will probably be much more difficult to place in terms of which decade they were taken in.