Wormwood Scrubs: Photographs by Bettina von Kameke

15th February – 11th March 2011
Location: Gallery & Project Space

Great Western Studio’s is pleased to announce a new and exciting set of exhibitions, talks and screenings starting with Bettina von Kameke’s photographs of Wormwood Scrubs. Her work explores enclosed communities and in these her most recent photographs, she investigates a community of male prisoners in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Observing the daily rituals of the inmates, she was keen to present the human aspects of their everyday routine, common to all human life, both outside and inside the prison, rather than portraying them in the traditional way as victims of society.

This is a collection of photographs, which looks at every day rituals with an investigating yet sensitive eye. As she says about her work: “I question and explore the interior and exterior conditions, means and forces, which make a communal life sustainable. My photographs disclose the individual aesthetics of an enclosed community, which I carefully observe through the viewfinder of the camera. The camera, either still or moving, creates a distance but at the same time allows me to enter the subjects’ space. The camera functions as an interface between myself and the world outside.”

Von Kameke’s previous work includes sailing with 31 Burmese merchant seamen from England to South Africa. She has also taken photographs of Benedictine Nuns in the Tyburn Tree Convent in London and travelled with the famous Circus Humberto through the Czech Republic. During the autumn of 2008 she was invited to an artist’s residency at Christ Church College in Oxford. Her photographic project involved the production of 101 portraits of the academics, the domestic staff, the choristers, the clerks as well as the Cathedral staff, which form the Christ Church Community.

External links: www.vonkameke.com