No image is safe after it enters my studio. These eclectic portraits I choose to work with - studio shots of 50s movie stars, a school photo of a young teenager lost and found in a box of car-boot rejectementa, the beauty queen from a vintage American year book – become my puppets, the cast in my imagination’s movie. This all started when I was very young. I didn’t like to read much, and when I wasn’t allowed to watch TV for some misdemeanour or other, I would make up stories from picture books and magazines like a surreal game of Consequences.
These found photographic portraits have a real history. Chosen for their age, the quality of the printing, a certain nostalgia and an accepted genre that finds them submerged in a collective consciousness, I feel that I have a right to them, that they are mine for the taking, or rescuing even, as so often they are discovered dusty and creased, stained and discarded in the corner of a junk shop or offered by some chancing e-bayer for a few pence plus p&p. I imagine each final image is carefully chosen from a chinagraphed contact sheet, in itself a storyboard or movie strip, and we are left with the nanosecond of the shutter-speed for half a century or more.
I ask myself what the image really is, if, perhaps, what we are presented with is not the absolute truth. (That old adage ‘the camera never lies’ is paradoxically untrue – I know this because of all the photos taken of me through the years that look nothing like me, that lie about my chins, my crow’s feet and my wonky ears. Or the beautiful self-portrait I chose for my Facebook profile that shows none of the above. These pictures say nothing about me.) I begin a Miss Marple investigation through the archived corridors of my imagination, memory and subjectivity to shape the character of the persons depicted in front of me, questioning who, what and where. Like Mary Shelley, I can conjure up a monster; with a nod to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, I’ll have a stab at “Where Are They Now”; or like Freud, discover the sitter’s alter ego, exposing their perceived hidden dreams, nightmares or fantasies. It’s like grown-up playing with dolls.
The ones that work (and there are many that don’t) somehow look like they should be this way. In “Bond”, 2009, the photograph of the baby and the folds of its blanket fit so perfectly on the contours of the woman’s lips, nose and eye, that the physicality of the collage is very solid. But there is something that happens beyond my control with a successful work; it is greater than the sum of its simple parts, becoming a new image with a new history to unfurl and, by association, a new memory. Perhaps it is something about the vulnerability of being human that I am trying to address. The dialogue that I pretend to have with these richly colourful characters who I embellish, manipulate, torture and caress, is actually a conversation only with myself.
The finished works leave my studio improved and updated or at the very least rejuvenated. Now they are out of my hands, released back into the real world to speak a slightly different language and the process starts all over again.
Julie Cockburn studied at Chelsea College of Art and Central St Martins College of Art and Design, graduating in 1996. She has shown extensively in the UK, Europe and the United States and has works in the the collections of Yale Center for British Art, The Wellcome Collection, British Land and Goss-Michael Foundation. She lives and works in London.
