Artist's Statement - Blue Water

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My photographic work makes relationships between constructed narratives of travel and photographic practices, with an emphasis on the deconstruction of narratives of Western (white, European) identity. The content of my work is derived from a range of texts - narratives of colonisation, the nature of the exotic, tourist photography and the cultural dislocation of the traveller. The work attempts to disrupt these narratives by interrupting and dislocating the indexical, documentary nature of photography. The expectation that the photograph is a touchstone of authenticity, of proof, of providing witness of the existence of some object or event is a common reading of the medium. The nature of photography is such, however, that it abstracts these recorded images- both through the process of the camera's mechanism - and by relocating the images in time and space. This ability that photographs possess - to move from their point of origin so that they may be seen in a new context and thus may be subject to further and new interpretations - means that it is a medium of shifting signifiers. This shift neatly parallels that which is available to the traveller through the re-construction of narrative that occurs in the journey from familiar to foreign.

Janice Abo Ganis, 2002