Melbourne Photobooth Project's photostream

Amy Spiers – Creator/ Director Melbourne Photobooth Project

Amy Spiers studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) at the University of Tasmania, Hobart. In 2005 she moved to Melbourne to complete honours at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her practice has developed an interest in documenting relationships, social behaviour and group dynamics. Melbourne Photobooth Project originated from an idea to measure the closeness (or potential for closeness) of Melbourne’s populace.

Melbourne Photobooth Project at Melbourne Fringe 2006 was Amy's first foray into creating a public art event. The event recieved a favourable review in The Age (http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-reviews/melbourne-photobooth-project/2006/10/04/1159641374363.html) and won the 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival Special Event Award.

The Melbourne Photobooth Project has since made an appearance at The Village at the 2006/7 Falls Festival, Marion Bay, Tasmania and has plans to be present at Trades Hall during the 2007 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.


What does it mean to be a stranger to someone?

In recent years I have become fascinated with people and their social boundaries. I have photographed awkward interactions and incongruous relationships in order to query what keeps us disconnected and apart.
In honours I photographed people I didn’t know in their homes, dealing less with the subjects themselves and instead considering the space (both physical and abstract) that existed between the stranger and I. My most recent project invited people into a makeshift photo booth to have their photograph taken with a stranger. In the form of traditional photo booth strips, the photographs captured the progression of interaction between two strangers sharing a confined space. Until this project my work had been exclusively photographic, but I now wish to further explore installation and performance in my work, relying on the participation and interaction of the viewer to complete the project. This is influenced by an interest in Relational Aesthetics.

During the process of the photo booth project I was encouraged by feedback from participants who felt liberated and excited by the concept. It seems that the invitation to breakdown social norms and cast aside inhibitions gave people the freedom to enact on a strong desire to have more meaningful contact with others. Despite major advancements in communication technology, people continue to be limited by accepted modes of social behaviour. Interactions between people can be mundane and trivial. In a sense, they are everyday events that hardly seem a legitimate subject for art. But anyone who has found themselves in a new job, a new city or churning through the profiles on an internet dating site will tell you that they are intensely important.

I am intrigued that my role as artist could develop into that of a facilitator and producer of connections and relationships. I’d like to experiment with designating spaces that exist outside of the constraints of social norms. Such spaces, like the photo booth, constitute interventions and ruptures in public space, and have the potential to mediate and articulate people’s desires to be more involved and closer to others. With the camera providing the license to make people do things they normally wouldn’t, I wish to grant people the opportunity to confess personal anxieties and enact on private impulse. In a political climate that urges suspicion and fear of strangers, I aim to encourage people to reject their customary paranoia in favour of making rare and significant contact with diverse individuals.