My Home is Takeshi´s Castle

More of the winning entries of Fresh & Wildeyed 08 at Fotonet.
A pretty popular subject is taking pictures/filma of people in their own homes. Trying to find a little bit of "reality" in an increasingly virtual world (and how to escape from it) is the subject of Steve Schofield.

Apart from being pure voyeurism, his photos of Sci-Fi geeks at home are wonderfully stylized and will probably make most viewers feel ashamed of their own boring normality. Admittedly, I could not get rid of doubts that these photos are not staged.
If you check Schofields Website you will probably think the same before you start (or want) to believe that these scenes are actually real.

Schofield explains: "My practice is concerned with the hyper-real. I reflect the desire of my sitters to create a utopian existence based on their obsessions and hobbies, each influenced by popular culture. By photographing science-fiction costumers in their own homes in Britain, I have sought to show how, through this strange sub-cultural world of fandom, like-minded people establish a fictional existence to escape the everyday."





I recently posted this bizarre collection of photos found on gay dating sites.
Ben Bailey from Brighton did a video project -"Real Virtuality"- filming "Gaydar"-participants in their homes.

Bailey explains: "This video work examines how the dating website Gaydar, and other virtual forums, rely on the human drive to encounter those we do not yet know. Through a reciprocal agreement to meet, two strangers can share a very intimate period of time. The sitters are filmed for a ten-minute period within the boundaries of a still photograph."

Compared to my "Atrocity Exhibition"-post, the stills from his project are very...well, healthy. I guess if you really want to see what is behind the monitor, you can´t make dates and bring your camera. You have to look for what people are giving away on their own. And this is virtually everything!