Andrew Curtis, Katie, 2008.
Type C colour print, 83cm x 115cm.
Andrew Curtis, Alice, 2008.
Type C colour print, 115cm x 85 cm.
Andrew Curtis, Sarah, 2008.
Type C colour print, 83 x 115 cm.
“Too chicken shit to make a pass, Andrew Curtis the photographer is nothing like a hip hop superstar. Which is lucky for us. More full of braggadocio, he might have sauntered over to say hi instead of remaining petrified and transfixed by the way the light from a cell phone teasingly illuminates a pretty young woman’s face and plays over her gloss lipstick. The product of an older single male’s loneliness, the resulting photographs are ‘pervy’. Curtis freely admits it: in fact he relishes the notion. This pervy voyeurism takes on a conscious cinematic quality. Restaging these original encounters Curtis carefully controls his mise en scène (especially the lighting) to preserve the illusion of a beautiful girl unaware of our gaze. This obliviousness is of course the necessary condition for our voyeurism. From a Freudian viewpoint it’s clear cut: libidinal desire sublimated into aesthetic mastery and control, spheres that Curtis has a long-established and proven ability in. In restaging these scenes he can safely and pleasurably revisit, and permanently extend, a moment that would have been an unconsciously anxious one in its original, unmediated form.” – Dylan Rainforth, excerpted from the catalogue to Andrew Curtis’s exhibition Cell
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