A bee, a quiet street, a noisy street, and a park at midday, 2020

A bee, a quiet street, a noisy street, and a park at midday, 2020, video still, two channel video, 2 min 50 sec.

A bee, a quiet street, a noisy street, and a park at midday responds to Francis Alÿs’s conclusion after his 1995 piece, If you are a typical spectator, what you are really doing is waiting for the accident to happen where he writes, “the observer is always involved, always implicated.”

To explore the conflicting nature of observation and participation in photographic documentation, I recorded myself observing the movements of bees, two streets with varying degrees of busyness, and a popular park at midday. Installed as a pair of videos, pairs of faces look at scenes that the viewer cannot; I become the subject as I observe the titled subjects for my own private consumption.