A bee, a quiet street, a noisy street, and a park at midday, 2020

A bee, a quiet street, a noisy street, and a park at midday (video still), 2020, two channel video, 2 minutes 50 seconds

After his 1995 piece, If you are a typical spectator, what you are really doing is waiting for the accident to happen, Francis Alÿs concluded: “the observer is always involved, always implicated.”

To explore the conflicting nature of observation/participation in photographic documentation, I recorded myself observing the movements of bees, two streets with varying degrees of busyness, and a popular park at midday. A quartet of faces look at scenes that the viewer cannot; I become the subject as I observe the titled subjects for my own private consumption.