Guards

Guards is an ongoing photographic work taking as its subject the security guards used to police the environments of contemporary art in recent years. Often with a background in protecting private property of one sort or another, or indeed of military service, the guard is central to our experience of many contemporary galleries.
In a large gallery such as the Hamburgerbahnhof in Berlin our experience as an audience has become one in which we are held back from fully encountering the work of art, through various strategies of security and protection, ensuring the commodity that is the work of art is preserved for its future value, at the expense of spectator engagement.
Questions related to the work also include whether a thriving art scene presupposes a capitalist market to purchase it? And does the monetary 'value' of art necessarily reflect its intrinsic 'worth'?
Taken with an instamatic camera and printed in black and white on photocopy paper the series takes/turns the interaction between the gallery guard and the spectator in the act of photographing that guard as an integral part of the gallery going experience.