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The Photographers´ Gallery Great 21, catalouge Pictures of a Family Somewhere in a city in the west of Sweden, near Gothenburg, a man goes about his life - he wakes up, takes the children to school, goes to work, comes back, speaks to his wife. At the weekends he breakfasts on the balcony or barbecues for friends. He appears absorbed in these daily rituals, rarely smiling. It is a perfectly uneventful family life - except for the event of it being photographed. This man who remains anonymous is Ulf Lundin's erstwhile best friend, the boy at school whom he followed and heroised. Years later, himself temporarily impecunious, single, living in a bedsit, Lundin wonders about the man whose life has become a mirror reflection of his own, the man who seemingly has everything. The two enter into a strangely consensual game. Lundin has permission to spy as long as he is never seen. He snatches shots through his windows, from behind the bushes in his garden, or hidden in his neighhbour's house - he even follows the man on his summer holiday. The pictures accumulate. Despite its intense voyeurism, its exhaustive record of another life, this is not a documentary work. It is less a portrait of the family than a self-portrait of the photographer. Lundin hints at one of the strange truths of the medium: that the photographer, although supposedly observing others in the world, is more often driven by the need to find his or her own image refracted back through the prism of the lens. For none are quite as self-absorbed as those who devote their time to surveilling others. Kate Bush Senior Programmer |