The first book in the 1 Artist 1 Concept series is Alice Shaw's People Who Look Like Mewhich involves having herself photographed with friends, family, and other bystanders whom she feels she shares common traits with.
Her project is a conceptual act in which Alice, as Director, creates an enlightening scene. It is not about the photographic document as much as it is about the activity of uniting people in a search for identity. She reveals the beauty in our shared connections. In this body of work she has taken the theory that sometimes when we photograph, we are pointing the camera at something we see reflected in ourselves. What she has done is come out from behind the camera and posed for the photographs with a subject she sees mirrored in herself.
The difficulty in placing Alice's work in a context reminds us that the search for identity is an unwelcome pursuit in contemporary culture. Behind all the impulses to be like someone else, all the marquees and loud speakers urging us to ignore our own identity, Alice reminds us, one person at a time, that we have more in common than we think.
63 pages, hardbound
11.25 x 8.25 inches
$20.00
