Projects by Nikki S. Lee

A book of the artist Nikki S. Lee’s ‘Projects’ - a series of works in which she repeatedly adopts the style/behaviour of a chosen subcultural group and becomes as much a part of it as possible. These photographs are ones she eventually asks someone else (a friend, or passing stranger) to take of her/them, and, without a knowledge of the conditions of their making, seem to belong less in a book and more to the familiar surfaces of a photo album, framed on a mantlepiece, stuck on a wall next to a bed.

Lee introduces herself to her chosen subjects as an artist and describes the nature of her project, but it is mysterious in the photographs how this foundational information figures in the resulting relationships and situations photographed. In the Seniors Project several elderly women flatly refused to believe that Lee was, in fact, a young woman in disguise, dismissing her story as a harmless eccentricity or early senility.

There are many ways of theorising Lee’s work, readily lending itself to questions of identity/identification, the performance of self and of relations to others, the formation of memory, and what it is that qualifies as the ‘real’; Lee herself is interested in the emotional quality of the images and strives for a banality that distinguishes her from artists such as Goldin or Sherman with whom she is often compared.

‘I just want to have really boring snapshots - people just standing in front of a camera taking pictures with a smile. If people think it’s boring, that’s fine. But somehow it is emotional, because I do have an attachment with those people, although I never force it.’

Hardcover. Very good condition. 2001.