Displacements
Mark Doman's photographs are about loneliness, about living life as individuals rather than as communities. About surveillance and fear. They comment on the present, but hint at the future. Doman's work focuses on areas characterised by high unemployment, drug dependency and rising crime and looks at how technology and photography in particular, can displace and isolate the individuals that it claims to protect. Photographed from his own video footage, Doman's images are indistinct and the subject unrecognisable, each appearing as if on the brink of disintegration. They represent the fragility of community, the collapse of a society previously made strong by the common concerns of work, family and faith. Nevertheless, Doman's work remains hopeful. Presented as backlit colour transparencies on light boxes the images are luminescent and look like stained glass, lending his subjects as iconographic, quasi-religious quality. In this way he honours them and the strength of the communities from which they have been displaced.
© Greg Hobson. Curator of Photographs at National Media Museum, UK.
Displacements was funded by Yorkshire Arts | Arts Council | Bradford Photography Museum