Artist Statement
Guy Batey’s photographs explore human absence, and the different ways in which an absence can make itself felt. It is the exploration of a paradox: there are no people in any of his images, and yet in all of them a sense of human presence can be felt. He finds urban spaces and objects that are often mundane – an ordinary street, corner or abandoned object – but which are lifted out of the everyday by a particular kind of resonance, an immanence, a sense of something still living and breathing.
In some of the photographs, objects have an incongruous presence. They seem to take on the imprint of its human history, as though it embodies traces of the people that have touched it.
Other pictures seem like just-vacated stage sets with their discarded props, with echoes of the performance still ringing around the space. The sense of emptiness acts almost as a vacuum, pulling the viewer into the picture to reoccupy the scene.
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