“I am here”
Jacqueline Felstead
16 Aug → 7 Sept 2013

"These portraits are of the residents of the notorious Gatwick Private Hotel. Here self-conscious residents stand with a blanket covering their face and upper body, standing as photographers themselves used to when they stood under a black cloth to better see through the camera lens.

The hotel owner states: ‘Most [residents] keep to themselves, stay in their room or go about their business without bothering anyone…Most of the residents you wouldn’t know existed. ? Anonymity and invisibility are harbingers of social inequality in a contemporary culture that increasingly relies upon visual representation.

To be invisible is to disappear. Yet to be photographed is to have ones image join a network of images, the reading of which is usually beyond the power of the subject to direct." — Jacqueline Felstead