The photographs in Julie Shiels’ latest publication were shot on her mobile phone over four ‘gripping’ years, with micro observations of the public spaces she endured while waiting for the plane, train, tram, or doctor, and sometimes captured moments when Shiels paused to wait for her partner to buy the milk, or for her dog to pee, etc.
Julie Shiel’s images are a study in banality, boredom and the mundane actions and objects of daily life.
Shiels’ images are “aesthetically, wilfully obstinate, the light too harsh in many cases, the colours too shiny and blank to offer the easy satisfactions we have come to expect from images of the everyday”.
Wilful they are, challenging our sense of aesthetics in their ordinariness, and most definitely not directly from the overly manufactured ‘lifestyle living’ on Instagram. This is not life as a brand.
There aren’t any humans in the images. The natural world is conspicuously absent. Cropped like this, one after the other, the images become claustrophobic, but somehow they can make you appreciate the oft-overlooked moments that unfold when life’s highlights are waiting to happen.
Waiting
Julie Shiels
Edited by Helen Frajman
Designed by Joy Hawkins
Essay by Miles Allinson
72 pages
265 x 245 mm
Hard Cover
Limited Edition: 150
Published by M.33, Melbourne, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9945170-4-3
www.m33.net.au
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