Elmira Watts' philosophy
of image-making

Elmira Watts' applies and manipulates just four essential elements to create her images:

• People
• Strangeness
• Narrative
• Light

• people

Elmira Watts is primarily a photographer of people. People are at the heart of her images. She gets friends, family and neighbours to pose for her. She presents them in a slightly enhanced way, a little isolated from their backgrounds and surroundings.

• strangeness

Elmira Watts brings out the strangeness of the inner reality of people.

Her subjects gain a just discernible aura of transcendence, a hint of other-worldliness. Her portrayals tend to be slightly unsettling, slightly kinked, strained toward fracture; the subjects in Elmira Watts' photographs, no matter how unremarkable, can appear weirdly isolated, alienated, displaced.

Her images can suggest an interior essence for people. They can say 'This, that you weren't expecting, is how the person is: accept it.' Or they can absent the personality of the subject from the image, imparting a sense of otherness and removal.

There can be unsettling incongruity in their settings too. A costumed dance pair, for instance, rehearses outdoors in the suburbs, on an ordinary domestic deck. Or some object in a scene looks out of place (or is clearly out of place, but at first seems to belong); or the world in which an image is set may appear to have a slightly plastic, almost candy-coloured veneer, subverting it's truth and reality.

Although Watts' portraits may also be warm and humanist – showing the familiar personality and inner life of a sitter directly – they more often alter an aspect of how the sitter is presented, kink or subvert it, so that we question it and look deeper.

• narrative

Elmira Watts' photographs are moments from a story. They are icons of its single pivotal defining moment. Everything is paused, is for a time still. This moment is a caesura, coming before some crucial turn, leading to resolution or dénouement.

Her photographs imply narrative, but don't hint at what that narrative might be. They simply give a pure sense something led to the moment, something will follow from it, and that it is the moment of prime significance.

• light

Elmira Watts' images often have a painterly quality. She paints interest and mood into her photographs with light. Light is her medium, the stuff and vehicle of her palette. The scenes she sets in front of her camera gain as much of their meaning from the lighting as from the staging.

The effects of mood she controls with her light are subtle, never obvious enough to be described as drama or emotion. They're never confused, never conflicted. She avoids tension between them, aiming for one definite controlled mood.

Those are the ingredients of Elmira Watts' recipe, the elements she mixes together to cook up her style of photograph.