AN ACCOMPLICE IN ARTS

There’s a famous black and white photo of a couple kissing on a busy Paris sidewalk. It’s taken by French photographer Robert Doisneau and it’s one of the world’s first street photos. But when Doisneau spent a year or two in England he only took a handful of shots. When asked why, he said it was because he didn’t see his subject in that culture. The intimate and the informal, as he knew it, wasn’t easy to spot. He suggested maybe it was something to do with how the French constructed language. Their division of informal and formal worlds.

The public lives and solo achievements of artists often have another side, one not so obvious on the surface. These are the deeper horizontal connections that, when caught on camera, have a flick of the candid, the interior, the personal. It’s like spotting the underside of a kea’s wing; a sudden iridescence, usually hidden.