FESTOON 2003-2007

Festoon is a series of photographs of personal possessions remaining in parked vehicles.

Made at night in several European cities, Festoon depicts car interiors as spaces of cinematic charge - silent imprints of the vehicles’ owners illuminated by torchlit time exposures in public spaces. Taken without the owners’ knowledge or consent, the images carry overtones of surveillance and the ambiguity of the private image in public space.

The clandestine manner of acquiring the images exploits ill-defined margins of legal distinction and social acceptibility, which vary geographically.  Festoon occupies the territory between paparazzi photography and remote imaging, excavating the conflict of ownership related to such processes of image acquisition. Ownership of imagery derived from a public space, no matter how assisted by technology, can be argued to reside in the public domain, but in a culture of growing complexity and commercial exploitation of voyeurism, it is increasingly difficult to discern any metrics of morality and acceptability.

In contrast, the documentation of public life under the cover of security and public control through remote imaging attracts none of the attention that paparazzi photography does. Unobtrusively deposited in street furniture or utility vehicles, increasingly intelligent autonomous cameras capture photographic imagery using magnification and amplification techniques already developed for military applications. The millions of images of citizens and vehicles in urban spaces that they continually generate are exploited completely without challenge by the state and commercially.