Vee Speers

As The Photographers’ Gallery prepares to move intoprestigious new premises, its curator senses a new-foundnational confidence in the medium, says Annie Dare

On first glance at the girls in Vee Speers’ series, The Birthday Party, it’s as if Nobokov’s Lolita has stepped into the frame via the pages of an Angela Carter novel – with the colour turned down. Boys cock AK47s, with handguns stuffed down their shorts and in their pockets. A boy in a gas mask carries a rat whose head is locked shut inside the jaws of a trap. Grafik calls it “anarchistic” in its take on childhood and play, “both improvisatory and highly theatrical… unsentimental but playful, macabre... in a way which is liberating both for us as viewer and perhaps for her subjects too”.

Speers says her portraits are a challenge to the viewer. “The children stare openly at the camera, but very little is revealed of themselves. There is always a certain tension in my work which draws the viewer into what is hidden beneath the surface. My intention was to show a real side of human nature, to expose a side of childhood that is not care-free or clichéd, and project a range of emotions and definitions which are part of an imperfect world.” Speers also wanted to use the imaginary birthday party backdrop to address both our collective human experience of war and our need to retreat from it into fantasy.

“We are exposed to fear and anxiety in our daily lives, and this has become an underlying part of our society, omnipresent,” she says. “The Birthday Party is punctuated with symbols of war –
some more blatant than others – and sees the characters responding on different levels. It’s also about creating a fantasy world as a kind of protective carapace.” The 46-year-old Australian is now based in Paris, but grew up surrounded by paints, cameras and chemicals thanks to her keen amateur photographer father and creative mother. “It was easy for me to be an artist, with no resistance from the family,” she says.

Speers has a puritanical approach to postproduction, and argues that retouching work has become an abusive process. “Photographs of models who are already beautiful are mutated beyond recognition, and the communication of the image then only passes at a superficial level because there is no more soul. A soulless portrait, no matter how aesthetically accomplished, is mute. This phenomenon has gone so far that it would be very hard to do a u-turn. But people would welcome more honest images in advertising now.” For her own shoots, she keeps things “simple, quiet and uncomplicated as possible, so that all that I need to focus on is the ‘right moment’, when everything lines up and I can bring it together. That’s the excitement of portraiture.”

Speers’ exhibition will appear at The Photographers Gallery until the beginning of April, and is at Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, until March 15. The Birthday Party will be published this summer by Dewi Lewis Publishing, UK.