Sean Raggett

The Empty Landscape (The Watcher/Watched) is a meticulous observation of a CCTV camera installed in a defeatured landscape, depicted using two separate and almost identical viewpoints using an analogue 8x10" film camera. At once a meditation on the state of surveillance and the absurdity of the camera's almost omnipresence in our contemporary lives, the triptych also includes a large-format portrait of an adolescent-looking 12-year-old boy. A juxtaposition occurs: the incredible scale and detail of a traditional film portrait on the one hand, contrasted with an implicit reference to the framing and style of a passport photograph, a universal format that carries strict guidelines and allow facial recognition software to instantly recognise one's visual fingerprint amongst a global database of other conforming images. The portrait of the boy necessarily activates the reading of the double landscape where the viewer is invited and challenged to "spot the difference", with the two prints reminding us that a duplicate is never the same as the original, and to likewise reflect on the lens as a critical but potentially problematic "eye" with which we perceive the world.