Thursday 27 October 2011

Nostalgie



Judges' comments
This small, quiet work, displaying great technical sensitivity in line and tone, is somewhat reminiscent of the intimacy of a 19th-century photograph. The young woman holds our gaze in an ambiguous sideways glance. Have we interrupted her? Is she shy, or merely reticent to perform for the viewer? Or could her demeanour suggest something more defiant, even seductive? Our family albums are full of images thus captured in a fleeting intimate moment from some distant past – this image is at once generic, yet painfully specific. As if from another age, this portrait is complicated by the ambiguity of the many possible cross-cultural readings. Nostalgie, as perhaps the name suggests, seems to come from a time and place whenIndochine was colonised by the French, Britannia ‘ruled the waves’ and the colonial gaze stared upon the East in all its oriental ‘otherness’.

Love for "In the mood for love"