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Art Monthly 2.99, 223

Annelies Strba/Ulf Lundin

The Photographers' Gallery London November 28 to January 30

........... In Stark contrast, the photographs of Ulf Lundin are almost entirely devoid of visual interest. As a child, Lundin tells us, he was envious of a slightly older school friend who seemed always to be more precocious and successful than he was. Years later this man was still living in the town in wich they grew up but now, unlike Lundin, had a job and a family. The man agreed to allow Lundin to take covert photographs of him and his family for a year on the condition that neither he nor his family were ever made aware that they were being spied upon. The result, chosen from over a hundred rolls of film, function not so much as a record of life of this anonymous man but as the confession of an obsessional vouyeur. The images in "Pictures of a Family" would have little interest unless we knew that they were covertly made: it is this voyeuristic, scopophilic aspect of the work that administers the only frisson that otherwise would be missing.
Lundin has admitted that he has envied this man's seemingly comfortable, settled lifestyle, his security and his family, while simultaneously being appald by its normality, but this is ultimately only an aside to what the pictures do and how they work for us. It is instead their very mediocrity, their monotony and their emptiness that attract us. Lundin's photographs act as signifiers for our own vouyeristic desires, our own appetites for covert surveillance, instanced also perhaps by the glut of Police, Camera, Action or Eye Spy-type prime-time, lowest-common-denominator half hour voy-fest on TV. We know how satisfying it is to watch someone unseen, even if it is just staring vaguely out of the window at an old lady with a tea-cosy on her head or watching some schmuck on the telly caught robbing an off-license by the CCTV cameras, and the effect of seeing these desires confirmed and endorsed by Lundin's photographs and their accompying texts is what gives the works their interest.
Lundin's photographs differ greatly from those of Strba, and it is interesting to see them both under the same roof like this. One wonders what the effect would have been if Strba's work took the form of mounted photographs and Lundin's were slide projections. The two sets of work are similar inasmuch as they each, while depicting other people, function as a form of autobiography, either by synecdoche (Strba), or in terms of showing evidece of the artist's activities over a defined period of time (Lundin), but ultimately it is Strba's work that remains in the memory.

John Tozer is an artist and writer.

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