Michelle Sank

Bio

Michelle Sank was born in South Africa and currently resides in the UK. She is a documentary photographer whose work explores contemporary social issues. Her photographs have been exhibited and published extensively in the UK, Europe, Australia and Mexico, South Africa and the U.S.A. Her imagery is held in the permanent collections of Allan Servais, Brussels, Open Eye Gallery Archive, Liverpool, Société Jersiaise and Guernsey Museum, Channel Islands. She has undertaken numerous commissions for prominent galleries and magazines in Europe and the USA and her work has won awards in prestigious competitions including the National Portrait Gallery and the British Journal of Photography. Sank has four published books, The Water’s Edge – Women on the Waterfront; Becoming – a major monograph featuring her youth portraits taken over five years; The Submerged about the landscape and inhabitants of Aberystwyth, Wales and My.Self about the cultural identity amongst diverse young people in the Black Country. Sank’s work tends to be themed around certain groups of people for example, people who live in her neighbourhood like in her project Breathe or local workers in a certain region like in her project Insula. Most of the time, her images are environmental portraits, on the rare occasion that they aren’t, they are just of the surrounding area of the subject and not the person.

Her Work

As I can’t talk about all her photo projects, I will just mention some of my favourites by her

1. Insula

“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” – Gareth Syvret

I will be taking a lot of inspiration from this project as the style of photography is part of what I would like to do during my personal study. The main image style being portraits really says a lot, I think she wanted to show what the people of the island look like, more specifically in their places of work.

2. Sixteen

“What is it like to be sixteen years old in the UK now? This is the central thread running through the national project Sixteen where some of the UK’s foremost documentary portrait photographers collaborated in opening up conversations with young people about their hopes and fears, and who or what sustains them, giving prominence to voices rarely heard.” – Sank on the project

This project is one of my favourites as it focuses in on people who are around my age, showing their experiences of growing up in an isolated place, which I can relate to from living on an island for my entire life.

3. Bye-Bye Baby/Celestial Echoes

These images deal with the notion of developing adulthood within the milieu of British society today. In Bye-Bye Baby I am exploring the way young boys and girls interpret their understanding of masculinity and femininity. Having left the purity of their childhood worlds, they seem to take on the trappings of the grown ups they mimic and of the status quo as set out in popular culture and the media. Celestial Echoes continues with this theme looking at this phenomenon within older adolescent girls.

Image Analysis

In this image, the use of natural daylight is intentional, Sank is trying to show the subjects in the most natural way possible, whilst still having light on them, even the girl in the background of the image has light on her. Continuing on from this, even if the girl in the background is slightly blurred, you can still see her and her emotions. For me, I naturally get drawn, visually, to the girl in the background, I think the lighting in this part of the image is more visually appealing, I however do understand why the girl in the foreground of the image is there, she has a more “domineering” aura, it’s almost as if she had asked Sank to put her in the foreground of the image. Contextually, I think the two girls in the image could be sisters, I think the one in the background could often be overshadowed by the other one, making me believe that she could be the younger one, however their ways of dressing contrast this, the one in the foreground looks as though she could be the younger of the two based on her way of dressing, the one in the background is dressed much more conservatively, just a hoodie and jeans, whereas the girl in the foreground is dressed much more “out-there”, wearing a colourful skirt and top. Out of the two, the girl in the background seems to be more mature. About this project, Michelle Sank said “Having left the purity of their childhood worlds, they seem to take on the trappings of the grown ups they mimic and of the status quo as set out in popular culture and the media.” In my opinion, this image presents this ideology and statement very well.