Annabelle Dalby - Statement

My work focuses primarily with the relationship between Photography and remembrance. My work is an investigation into the nature of the personal archive, the family album and photo objects. I am interested in and attempt to examine how we create our own identity and how objects, and images can enhance, distort and fictionalize the past through photography. I am fascinated with a hankering after the lost moment, which is mostly recorded through the photograph, trinkets and other memorabilia and the desire to return if only through photography.

The family album, the curiosity and complexities that exist in the domestic hanging, display and content of the personal photograph inspire much of my work.

As-well as taking photographs often of other peoples private spaces and objects that I find. I use found, discarded imagery, which I collect at flea markets, car boot sales, second-hand shops and the street to use as inspiration or through reworking they become part of the work.

Those objects I cannot collect, I photograph such as flower shrines on roadsides, bookshelves, mantle piece memorabilia and so on. The more documentary style images of other people's belongings are an important part of my practice and could be seen as collecting traces and details of past moments, and how we make order of them. Allowing one to look again at what is easily overlooked.

London Portraits (from an archive of found images) is an ongoing collection of passport photographs I have found on the streets of London over the last 8 years. I have lovingly re-photographed them and printed them on watercolour paper giving them a painterly quality and enlarged to a more classical portrait size this allows the viewer to really examine the scratches, tears, bends and dents in each of these anonymous portraits. Bringing together this anonymous group of people who have all once (or at least their loved ones have) been part of the ebb and flow of the city.