Jess Loseby
United Kingdom, 1972. Lives and works in Sussex, England


Places I have never been people I have never seen (2004)


One of the most relevant happenings that has occurred with the increased affordability  and generalised use of digital image production resources and the extreme availability of their use (it is particularly noteworthy that practically all mobile telephones now include a photographic and video camera) is what we might call a certain process of "amateurisation" of the visual. In fact, the images we can find in the web are increasingly produced by people who are not professionals in the sector of image and generally focus on affective worlds and personal and family leisure. There is already an intense proliferation in blogs and videoblogs of self-representations and the representations of family members, friends, pets, etc. as well as of the happiest and most enjoyable moments ( parties, holiday trips, etc.). These are precisely the images that Jess Loseby includes in this work. Found in the web using the Google search engine and a series of terms that are usually used as photo captions in family albums and websites, like "under a tree", "shopping", "at a hotel", "playing in the snow”, “in the sea”, etc. Loseby introduces us to the intimacies and affections of people that are total strangers to us. With a gentle defocussing and refocussing of certain areas of these photographs, she gets us to pay attention to certain characters and details of characters, to experience a mock-up of a process of reception that is surely similar to the process caused by the affectively interested perception that would be experienced by the person that took the photograph, those who were photographed or who could recognise those in them, as their friends or family members. A precise, revealing approximation to the almost always ignored, warm and always affective beauty of the amateur imaginaries.