- Venue
- International Gallery
- Location
At first glance there is something odd about Ben Zuhlckes' photographs. His images depict ordinary people in and around Liverpool whose presence and gestures are extra-ordinarily out of synch with their everyday surroundings. The exhibition title 'Game' offers a clue to their reading. The game in question in part refers to the way that Zuhlcke openly plays with the historical tradition of photography and our contemporary expectation -and reliance upon – the photograph to actually evidence and represent an unbiased or mechanical window into the real world. Contrary to this expectation, the images in 'Game' knowingly show themselves as fake, the evidence has been deliberately falsified.
The game in the exhibition title also refers to the Liverpool FC football match, from which the photographs are originally taken. The images are immediately recognisable within this context; the football pitch is the ground from which we can interpret these individuals and their elation, raw aggression and utter dejection. However, Zuhlcke, in keeping with his deception, has ensured all but the smallest visible signifiers of football remain. The ball, pitch, surrounding stadium and often the strip are missing from the photographs. This is Zuhlckes' game: the conspicuous lighting and cut-and-paste backdrop of the Liverpudlian landscape reveals the 'players' have been photographed in a studio. Not only that but the individuals pictured are hired models, and not players at all.
The emotional and physical actions enacted by the models are thus revealed as wholly staged; their 'false' poses are three times removed from the original football game that was Zuhlckes' inspiration. These third hand or mimed postures, far from being empty gestures, are a photographic case study into human emotion. 'Game' puts the specific social, behavioural and cultural norms of football- the last bastion of traditionally male, working class and heterosexual activity – under the microscope. In this way Zuhlckes' photographs stage a theatre of emotions that are simultaneously false and exaggerated, yet very real.
