Susan Bozic is a Conceptual photographer. Susan was asked to provide images in the following three disciplines: Portrait, Architecture and Music.
"I have a long-standing relationship with photography and in my photographic history I have chosen to work primarily within in the area of conceptual photography. Photography has a complex lineage, and its interrelationship with other visual media, such as painting, cinema and advertising, along with its familiarity in our day-to-day lives, makes it an ideal visual medium for challenging and destabilizing our pre-conceptions and conventional expectations.
Photography is a medium that allows us to travel through space and time and all too readily blur historical barriers. In my photographic work, the spaces between truth and fiction, past and present, are vast and at times, decidedly blurred. In a series of lushly staged photographs of taxidermy birds set within artificially constructed theatrical tableaux, it was my desire to create a provocative visual dialogue between the conventions of contemporary staged photography and 17th Century Dutch still-life painting.
In advertising, we are inundated with photographic imagery that propagates and reinforces unrealistic ideals and desires. The lives we might lead if we only had an attractive, affluent partner and all the requisite material possessions. In a series of elaborately staged images with myself cast as the primary subject, a handsome male mannequin ably plays the role of an ideal date and prospective partner. The photographs in this series invite reflection as to how readily we surrender to these ideals, but they also provoke an open-ended dialogue wherein we begin questioning all the imagery that does not fit so readily with the realities of our day-to-day lives."
