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Untitled#28 (Override). 1997

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American photographer ANNA GASKELL uses her medium as a kind of stage set onto which she projects her  fairly personal exploration of the narratives surrounding the literary adventures adolescent girls.

To create these psychological photographic tableaux, ANNA GASKELL adopts a cinematic approach towards photography employing “actors”(young girls), artificial lighting and “framing” the action taking place within the picture space. Unusual viewing angles and close ups violent cropping result in a set of menacing claustrophobic spaces that intimate not only anxiety but a general psychological unease.

GASKELL’s work does not posses specific narrative but rests rather on a series of suggestive “actions”. She’s not interested in the beginnings of the stories; it doesn’t matter how the character got here. She’s not interested in the endings of the stories; it doesn’t matter how the story might end. She is interested in probing those in-between parts of the narratives, when the characters begin to understand that things might not work out well.

In fact her whole oeuvre is based on implication rather than description; it is this ambiguity hovering as it does between what is imagined and what one sees between reality and fiction that reinforces the sense of malaise and intrigue for the viewer.