Zan Boag: Over the years, you’ve covered all aspects of the body. I’m particularly interested in the series that you did on hands, but, of course, it’s difficult to ignore the body as a photographer.
Tim Booth: ‘A Show of Hands’ was the first time I’d really gone deeper, because a lot of the stuff that I do as a photographer, it’s very much the skin, it’s the shell. Even when you’re taking a portrait, you start with the shell, and then think, “Well, can I get anything out of that? Can I get some personality out?” But you’re very much starting this under a structural, external outlook. Obviously, I’m obsessed with the aesthetic because I’m a photographer, but once I was able to park the aesthetic part, it was really about trying to get inside the person a bit more, but with less information.
I’m a victim, we’re all victims to it, but you can walk down the street and look at someone, and make so many judgements based on your own experience of what other people who look like that might have been like; and suddenly, you poke everyone with that, which is incredibly short-sighted. But we are fairly basic animals, and I don’t know whether it’s a primal thing, the way we look at people. Partly it’s shape recognition, I think; we’ll look at a certain shape of mouth, eyes, and nose and make judgements based on that shape, which is just so wrong. But we can’t help doing it. It’s like a knee-jerk reaction.
In focusing on the hands, you’re setting aside the other physical elements that we do tend to A Show of Hands
