Research insights

Lisa and John revisits and re-evaluates a photographic series I made in the late 1980s. As a work of Expanded Photography, the project relocates the images in the wider field of contemporary art, using the conventions of verbatim theatre and immersive environments to critique documentary production within those images. 

Lisa and John uses collaboration to disrupt the documentary paradigm in a number of ways. By making Lisa and John, the original subjects, active agents in the new project, they were free to intervene in their own depiction, to argue over their memories and criticise the photographer. 

The work calls into question the certainties of representation. Indeed, making the photographer a character in their own artwork is hardly playing by the rules. As a Brechtian device, it opens the works up to a fuller scrutiny. 

The 3D work also further disrupts the documentary paradigm by making the audience active agents, who leave behind their observer status to break through the “fourth wall” and, bending close to examine the maquettes, become part of the action. By the tenets of conceptual art, they are “completing” the artwork. 

While much post-structural theory concluded representation was so compromised it could only ever produce poor fragments of the real world, the new works consciously remain within a realist paradigm. In this sense, the Lisa and John project is not a dismissal of representation, but rather an open-ended exploration. Collaboration in documentary practice is usually thought of in terms of working collaboratively with subjects in the moment of creating the images. The originality of Lisa and John lies in using collaboration to disrupt and re-explore past work. It creates a future space for research, revision and reinterpretation of archives.