Ça-n’a-pas-été

In my series Ça-n’a-pas-été – this/that has-not-been – I appear as the main subject [as a main subject, any main subject], having photographed myself in a range of different places – in domestic spaces, travelling, getting married – using a long shutter-release cable. The work is a form of study into self-(re)presentation and readings of personal or family photographs, where I place emphasis on the ‘social games’ and conventions of editing, selecting and presenting photographic images that come with familial depictions. The shutter-release cable is visible in the resulting photographs, as I wished to place emphasis on the construction of not only the images in Ça-n’a-pas-été, but in any personal or family album. This project was also where I started to explore how one presents oneself to the camera for images intended for the album, including the presentation of oneself for oneself and of oneself to possible others.

Ça-n’a-pas-été was exhibited as installation in 2005, featuring a fictional personal album Ça-n’a-pas-été (album) created using a long shutter-release cable visible in each photograph containing a human subject, a slideshow of actual family photographs from which I had crudely myself cut out, and a set of domestic furniture severed in half, seemingly cut off by an imaginary viewfinder.
The title of the exhibition was a play on Barthes’ concept of the ça-a-été (this/that-has-been); what Barthes defines as that which one cannot contest in photography – that what Barthes calls the ‘necessarily real thing’ was positioned in front of a camera at a point in time, making the photographic image ‘a certificate of presence’.
The actual or material quality or character of this recorded presence of a ‘real thing’ cannot, however, be certified. The title of the exhibition hence alluded to and further reinforced the idea of the constructed qualities of family and personal photographic albums.