Sam Taylor-Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood, Soliloquy V and Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII, 1998 (installation view detail)

 

The artist and work that I was particularly moved by was Sam Taylor-Wood's photograph Five Revolutionary Seconds. To me, personally I felt that this photograph depicted today's society perfectly. Everyone in the photograph was doing their own thing totally unaware of the things that were going on around them, no matter how particularly strange they were (for example the man on the stairs prancing in his underwear.) Today our society is very impersonal and self-absorbed. I believe that the women laying on the couch with the man perched over her is a very good example. She is so wrapped up in herself and her own thoughts that she doesn't even realize that he's there. It depicts the impersonal factor of our society by the fact that everyone is in the same room but not even bothering to see what the others are doing. They're just going about their routine and ignoring what is going on around them. Photographs don't usually appeal to me but I was personally intrigued by this one. It was so busy that you could stand there for hours and continue picking up new aspects of the photograph. I also like how the artist added her own background (being English) to the photo by the picture in the English style house. The colors in the photo were very rich and warm unlike upper class American houses that are extremely sterile, so the photograph gave the impression that it was a lived in home and that it was depicting normal, common place individuals.