Michelle Sank was born in Cape Town, South Africa and currently resides in the UK. Sank is well known for her ‘youth work’ among projects: thematic series of portraits of young adults, often dealing with an adolescent struggle to find their place in the world or define their identity. Her ability to evoke these human states through a direct yet deceptively potent vision has led to numerous commissions and residencies photographing young people in diverse cultural settings: Belfast, Northern Ireland; San Francisco, USA; Manheim, Germany; Wolverhampton, England etc.
Introduction Article – Michelle Sank Insula: Archisle
Writing about her work, the photographer David Goldblatt has observed: “Michelle Sank uses a simplicity of means that falls way below the zealous art critic’s qualifying level for success”
Insula is a photographic project that Sank took part in in 2013 on the island of Jersey where she arrived in April and had a residency on the island for 6 months when geographic and historical influences also loomed large.
Working outside of particular demographic scenarios Sank’s Jersey imagery continues to develop lyrical vision within which the defining influences are place and cultural geography. Insula eschews a specific brief though the work responds to the wealth of nineteenth century portrait photographs within the Jersey Photographic Archive that it now joins as a powerful point of interpretation. The beguiling qualities of these new photographs call to mind the position that Lewis Baltz found for photographic series “somewhere between the novel and film”. As such, Sank’s photographs offer a visual poem to the island.
I have chosen to look at Michelle Sank’s work as I enjoy and like the visual aesthetic of the photographs when they are produced I like how they are taken and what they are representing which is why I have chosen her as one of my photographers.
I have chosen the photograph below as my chosen image to analyse as it was one of the photographs that I was most drawn to. The women shows to be in the centre of the photograph lying close to the foreground, she is the only figure that can be seen in the whole frame and I find this quite interesting as it singles her out and I feel almost enhances her surroundings as there is no other noise coming from the image apart from her figure and it creates a quiet background and surrounding which I feel is effective here. The way her mouth is formed suggests she may could have been talking, from the squint it suggests the natural sunlight is lighting her from the front, as we might guess that she could be talking it makes this a much more personal shot as she would be having a conversation with the photographer, it feels more personal and less staged; almost just in the moment.
