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2 graduate portfolio Kelly Anne O’Brien niversity of South Wales MA Documentary Photography Are You There? There was just a single moment of near contact with my father when I was aged 7; as his hand reached through the letterbox of my front door. He died 8 years after this brief encounter. A decade later I would learn of his death, from the mouth of my grandmother as we idled through the aisles of a supermarket. To reveal this immaterial man I meet with clairvoyants to trace an impression of my father. This work explores the notion of perspective and what arises in the absence of evidence for the creation of truth. All characters involved in this uncovering provide subjective, self-serving and often contradictory versions of the same narrative, resulting in a fractured and multifaceted story.
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Kelly Anne O’Brien 3 Michael Mack: Transcribing history has long been at the root of photography, and yet some of its great successes have been in the hands of artists attempting to relate purely emotional states involving no physical engagement between the camera and subject. O’Brien has explored her missed relationship to an absent parent through subtle use of abstract details, drawings and text to build a sensibility which transmits a taut emotional state of yearning.

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graduate portfolio

Kelly Anne O’Brien niversity of South Wales MA Documentary Photography

Are You There? There was just a single moment of near contact with my father when I was aged 7; as his hand reached through the letterbox of my front door. He died 8 years after this brief encounter. A decade later I would learn of his death, from the mouth of my grandmother as we idled through the aisles of a supermarket. To reveal this immaterial man I meet with clairvoyants to trace an impression of my father. This work explores the notion of perspective and what arises in the absence of evidence for the creation of truth. All characters involved in this uncovering provide subjective, self-serving and often contradictory versions of the same narrative, resulting in a fractured and multifaceted story.

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