Becoming
Michelle Sank
Belfast Exposed
English
Texts by Helen Lucey and David Goldblatt.
Hardcover
96 pages
300 x 245 mm
2006
ISBN 9781872771670
This monograph of work by South-African artist Michelle Sank contains a selection of portrait photographs from projects developed over 5 years. For year, she has photographed young people in different social contexts across the U.K.. The portraits have been produced through a combination of ‘street photography’ and negotiated youth group collaborations. Among others, Sank has worked with young people living in interface areas of Belfast, young carers- responsible for the care of a sick parent or siblings, teenage mothers and juvenile ex-offenders on a rehabilitation programme. She has worked on residencies in Cardiff, Belfast and Liverpool. Sank is particularly interested in the experience of growing up, that difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. Her photographs have a strong formal aesthetic but are not staged and the subjects are not directed. Individuals are invited to present themselves to the camera as they deem appropriate. The outcome is a series of portraits that reveal a quiet conflict within its subjects. The young people confidently embrace the opportunity to be photographed with attitude and grace. At the same time they appear vulnerable and doubtful, questioning the complex process and changing realities of becoming an adult. Sank is interested in the way that individuals are shaped by social structures, how gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity ‘enter into’ us as subjects.
(source: https://www.amazon.com/Michelle-Sank-Becoming-David-Goldblatt/dp/187277167X)
About the Artist
Michelle Sank (b. 1953, Cape Town) is a South African photographer. She left there in 1978 and has been living in England since 1987. Her images reflect a preoccupation with the human condition and to this end can be viewed as social documentary. Her work encompasses issues around social and cultural diversity.
michellesank.com
(source: https://www.michellesank.com/about)
About the Publisher
Belfast Exposed is the North of Ireland’s premier contemporary photography organisation, commissioning, publishing and showing work by artists and photographers from the North of Ireland and across the world.
belfastexposed.org
