Julian Burgin

This series began in 2008 with the photographs of my daughter who is the constant figure throughout the work. Each of the pairings show her in a familiar setting while the accompanying image shows a vignette of daily life.

At first glance, these snapshot like images seemed incidental, yet the formal similarities between the images in each diptych began to emerge as a driving force behind the work.

The work initially started as a spontaneous reaction to the world around me but I was soon struck by the connections emerging between certain pairs of photographs. It was as if one picture was affecting another, and I was reminded of a phrase used in physics: ‘Spooky action at a distance’, used by Einstein to describe how two separated, and unrelated, objects seem to anticipate the other.

And as I started to collate and organise my raw ‘data’ into significant patterns I reflected on my observation of how one image may determine a property of another. New clues as to what may have motivated the work began to emerge, and I started to feel that in its own peculiar way photography can be a way to knowledge.

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 Julian Burgin, who lives and works in London, was born in 1967.  He received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2001.  He has exhibited in Paris, Vienna, Bologna as well as London, and his work has appeared in publications, including GQ Style, Camera Austria, Vice, Tank Magazine and Draft Magazine.