Museum
Museum  is a series of candid portraits of people concentrating on exhibits in museum collections.  It follows a long tradition of candid portraiture in public places and was particularly influenced by Walker Evans’ Subway portraits made in the late 1930s. The subjects  are unaware of me, the photographer and they present themselves without self-conscious posing. The grainy black and white aesthetic creates a feeling that the viewer’s gaze is voyeuristic. The work is presented as an archival box of window mounted photographs as in a museum’s collection. This references the way artifacts in a museum are catalogued, but turns it on its head with the museum visitors becoming the catalogued items. Museum  is part of my wider investigation into strategies for ‘disarming the pose’ of portrait  subjects.
​ Keith Greenough, June 2012