fiona's space: August 2006

What the papers say

Fiona Rogers: Interview
'GLL Greenwich Leisure Centre'
Fiona Rogers is a recent graduate in Arts and Media from Surrey Institute of Art and Design. Her series of photographs ‘Peep’, exploring the male and female gaze, opens on Tuesday August 16 at Viewfinder Photography Gallery.
What is ‘Peep’ about?
They show women getting dressed and undressed in changing rooms in a series of sports centres. They’re very grainy images shot with a fish eye lens so that they resemble surveillance photographs. People tend to assume that the photos are taken by a man because the nude has traditionally been seen as a male subject but they’re not only about the difference between the male and female gaze. The viewer also feels uncomfortable because they’re images that you’re not supposed to see, so it’s also about the difference between public and private space; I want the viewer to question what they’re looking at and think about whether it’s okay to look at a private image, just because it’s being shown in a public space.
Do you want people to know whether the images were taken covertly?
I’m happy for it to be left ambiguous. If they don’t know about the project, most people will assume that the photographs were genuinely taken covertly. Whereas I did get permission from the venues and they are all women I know. I just asked them to do whatever they would normally do in a changing room if they were getting ready to go swimming. I was standing on stepladders and benches to get the kind of aerial view I needed.
Would it make a difference to how the images are viewed if they really were taken without the women’s knowledge?
Well, initially I did actually try and take undercover photographs using a camera hidden in a bag but the images were all too dark and I couldn’t get the results I wanted. If they had been usable, I’m not sure how I would have then felt about showing them. But what I realised was that whether the images were genuine or not wasn’t really important; what mattered was that they could be perceived as genuine.
What’s your next photographic project going to be?
It’s very much in the very early stages but I’m back in women’s changing rooms, in venues like Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. This time however, it will be actual documentary shots - of women performers from London’s burlesque scene. Again they will be very grainy images but with a different ambiguity in that they will probably be much more difficult to place in terms of which decade they were taken in.
Interview: Helen Sumpter, Mon Aug 7

see the interview here: http://www.timeout.com/london/art/features/1796.html#

see the British Journal of Photography review here:
http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=bjp_onshow

Photographs from OhmyGodiMissyou, Friday 4th Aug

Photographs from OhmyGodiMissyou @ the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club.

Pole Addicts are sexy duet of fully trained dancers, specialising in the art of the pole. For more infomation go to http://www.myspace.com/poleaddicts or http://www.poleaddicts.com/

Peep Photography Exhibition - Viewfinder Gallery, London

From our covert hide out, we are confronted with the uncomfortable exhilaration of watching. There is something far away from our everyday reality TV trash – this is a series more seedy and disturbing, underhand and illicit perhaps. Enticed and compelled 'to look', Rogers illustrates for us the stealthy, secret story of the gaze. We can ask 'who?' and 'why?' but the answer unavoidably is to confront our own selves. This is a series that invokes an underworld of concealed pipe work - the opportunity and anticipation of the spy-hole. Voyeuristically dark and confronting, yet thought-provoking in its querying of gender roles, 'Peep' is a show not to be missed.