Jo Longhurst

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

Dwelling on human attempts to intervene in the evolution of species, Jo Longhurst’s photographic study could perhaps only have been replicated by Brave New World author Aldous Huxley – had he been let loose with a lens at Crufts. “I’m interested in why we are driven to perfect ourselves,” says the Essex-born photographer, who has been photographing giant portraits of show whippets for years. The frontal mugshots, at eye level and measuring 30 by 40 inches, stare adoringly, quasihumanly, towards the lens.

Longhurst contends that as humans we subtly but continuously and obsessively, deploy sight to sift, select, condemn and rank each other. Whereas these dogs, whose very raison d’etre, as proxies for their breeders’ pursuit of purity and perfection, is to submit to the same human visual inspection in the show-ring, are ironically free from visual analysis. “They are amazing creatures, sight hounds bred for hunting and with incredible vision and a huge capacity for
detail. But representation doesn’t interest them at all.”

Longhurst denies the series – “I know what you’re thinking” – is dystopian, and instead professes ambivalence to the zeal for the ideal she documents. “There’s a thrill to seeing the whippets, but I am left questioning the way we have shaped the dogs – shaped and moulded them, affected their personalities and natures. I use the dog circuits as a mirror to what we are doing within human society – noticing this longing to be better, healthier and stronger, and asking where it will take us.”

It’s a rich seam, this peculiarly human compulsion for impossible perfection, and one which Longhurst, who was given her first camera only on her 30th birthday but has already earned herself a doctorate from the Royal College of Art, will continue to chart with her next series,
on gymnastics. She is a whippet owner and a former gymnast, but sees parallel forces at play within photography too. “All art practices are fraught with possibilities of failure, but I think photography, with all its technical stages, is more so than most – it is obsessive. My images are flawed. Not that I’m not technical, but I’m more interested in mood and emotion that seeking to capture immaculate images on large format cameras.”

Her work will next be on show from April to June, at the Museum Folkwang, in Essen, Germany.

Grafik says she was intrigued by the portraits’ initial sense of classicism. “But the repetitions in her work are where her project gathers momentum. In these repeated images of dogs standing to attention or looking straight into the camera, we notice their individual characteristics, scars and imperfections.”