touch

an exploration into personal space. 2005 ongoing…

touch was conceived in 2005 when I acquired my first digital pocket camera. The camera enabled me to shoot spontaneously. I was curious to see what would be revealed if my subjects posed with my hand? There would be no rules or limitations.

Would their placement of my hand expose that illusive permitter which defines our comfort zone- our personal space? Would I be invited inside or shut out; kept at arms length? What would it tell of them; what would it say about me?

With over 1,500 touch images taken to date I continue the project with the goal of exposing collective traits and commonalities within groups and societies.

In his photo series touch, Evans explores the boundaries between subjects. He instructs them to take his hand and place it in the frame of the photograph and by doing so explores the cultural and psychological limits of connectedness. Some take his hand and keep him at a distance while others are prepared to take him into their bodies, literally. The viewer is invited to reflect on the limits of physical contact between strangers, both in its cultural and gendered context, and to explore their own thresh-hold of acceptable touching. touch also challenges the conventions of photographic portraiture. Evans is both subject and photographer as he invades the space of both the sitter and the image. His intervention blows apart the separation of the artist and subject, they can no longer be discrete, and the viewer must consider Evans’ influence over the sitter. This work embodies Evans’ belief that all his photographic portraits have himself as the central subject and that the images he produces of a sitting are a record of an event in which he is central.

Peter E. Ross

'Naked Touch'  is Gavin Evans’ expansion of his previous work  touch  in which he explored the cultural and psychological limits of connectedness. In  naked touch  Evans invites the viewer to explore the relationship between the self and the corporeal, and contemporary attitudes to nakedness.

Members of the public, mostly strangers, were invited by Evans to be photographed naked and then asked to place the photographer’s hand in the frame. Unlike in traditional ‘nude’ photography, the participants are far from anonymous and have a very direct momentary relationship with Evans ‘the photographer’. This creates an altogether different cadence of intimacy and potential vulnerability to these photographs. The photographer is present in the image and his relationship to the sitter is transparent. He is literally showing his hand, thus giving us permission to look,  challenging our status as voyeur. 

The  naked touch  collection is at once topography and portraiture. Across these images patterns emerge of bodily boundaries and the self’s relationship with the Other. Simultaneously, personality reveals itself as the participants project themselves through the photographer’s touch and the photograph itself.

What is revealed is diverse. Some of the participants are confident, some vulnerable, some vain. A few disturb or subvert, while others show unexpected humour.  naked touch  runs counter to the oft repeated argument that the oppressive power of beauty advertising and media obsession with celebrity bodies has made us dissatisfied with our own. Many of the participants in  naked touch  seem at ease with their bodies, reconciled to their corporeal reality and unintimidated by the media’s ‘perfect body’. 

naked touch  encourages us to reflect on the nature of voyeurism. It re-presents the naked body in juxtaposition with the photographer and the viewer, inviting us to reflect on the limits of physical contact between strangers and to explore our own threshold of acceptable touch and nakedness.

Peter E. Ross