As I had another shoot booked in with the same couple from before, I decided to use this opportunity to recreate Stephen Barkers style of work from Nightswimming by recreating the circumstances in the studio. All light was removed or turned of apart from one, that was on the over side of the room and obscured. I had of course thought to myself of the human circumstance of Nightswimming, the sex and the vouyerism, the way people became strangers in the dark and I began to worry that by not being in a real dark room, that I was missing out on something very important and intrinsic to Barkers work. It soon became clear to me though, that the human circumstance was about to become very real for myself and my two models, as they began to "Play" in the dark, and I began to shoot.
In the dark, our identity's were stripped in spite of the truths we held, all three of us became participants. The shoot began to feel like performance art and I felt less of a vouyer and more as if I was taking part. That my presence was not that of of a photographer hidden and unkown, but a physical part of the moment, influencing the figures. Barker describes Nightswimming on his website as a "Tour of the Self", noting that the work is not a documentary, or objective. He is very aware of his part in to play in those spaces, as I was in this one. Weather it was the near complete darkness of the studio, or the Call of the void that was me, somewhere in the darkness lurking camera in hand, but this time they didn't hold back.
The resulting set of images, for me, feel less contrived than my previous shoot, more natural, almost raw. Especially in regard to the colour images. The monotone images, while more stylistically related to Barkers, almost feel as if they are trying to be arty, and its as if the black and white has been used to balance out the fact that no matter what these are pictures of men having sex with men. For Barker, even in 1993 black and white may not have been a choice. For me it is a conscious decision, and while the aesthetic of the monotone images does appeal to me, the raw nature of the colour images comes of as more honest.
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