by John Hilliard
If Henry Cornelius’s 1955 film I Am A Camera (based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories) doesn’t literalise the title’s proposition in it’s on-screen action, then Dziga Vertov, speaking of his seminal 1929 avant-garde production The Man With The Movie Camera, comes closer: ŒI am the machine which shows you the world as I see it?. Better still, in Death Watch (Bertrand Tavernier 1979), a TV journalist (Harvey Keitel) has a video camera implanted in one unblinking eye, constantly transmitting a live image (of a slowly dying Romy Schneider) back to the station. He is a camera. So to is Ela, protagonist of Eurudice’s erotic novel f32 (Virago Press, 1993), whose disembodied then reunited vagina develops a lens and operates as a stills camera. The camera body is their body, the aperture one of their apertures. In the three films, that orifice is the eye; in the novel, it is the vagina; and in the photographic work of Lindsay Seers, it is the mouth.

The body as a vessel, as instrument, as receiver and transmitter, reflexively paralleled with the recording and projecting mechanics of film, photography and video, is a consistent feature of Seers work. Many of her still images are characterised by two themes: the artist herself as both the viewing subject/ recording instrument and viewed object; the comparability between photography and vampirism.

To make a picture, the artist first disappears into a light proof bag, places a pre-cut piece of (usually) colour negative paper at the back of her mouth, then positions a black gum shield (with a pin-hole) in the front, using either her lips or her hand as a shutter to cover the opening before and after the exposure. In the Auto- Cannibal series (1997/9), she wears vampire teeth, holds up a hand mirror to reflect her face and the environment behind her, and takes a photograph. In these pictures not only do we see the reflected, staring, fanged and caricatured head, distended by the pinhole’s wide angel effect, but our view is through the jagged frame of the photographer/vampire’s teeth. Moreover that frame produces a shape remarkably reminiscent of a winged bat, and the whole image is blood- red in colour. It is, in fact, literally blood-red - the penetration of light through the photographer’s cheeks, coloured by the network of the capillaries, leeching onto the paper. Made similarly, Fallen (2001), more simply frames a tilted vista of trees, presumably as registered from the mouth of the fallen vampire. Seemingly less complete certainly less comical, these understated images are nevertheless stronger, and the wintry colour-drained trees a disturbing contrast to the crimson- mouthed surround.

In another series, Black Bag (2001), each individual work comprises of a pair of photographs. One shot, black and white, glossy, objectively evidential in style, shows the artist as victim - lying in a hotel room; propped against an up turned boat on a beach; sprawled on waste ground by a wrecked and abandoned car. The other, the view from the artist’s mouth, matt, coloured, is highly subjective and saturated in lurid redness. With this second shot the tables are turned. It is as though the hapless victim is in fact the lure, a brooding predator, surveying and registering the desolate locales through the distorting and contaminating filter, waiting for its prey.

The vampiric reading of photography centres on a particular perception; that the fatal kiss of the shutter steals an unrepeatable moment of existence, yet in so doing invests its subject with eternal life. The photographer is both the predator and saviour, and when the photographing subject is also the captured object, then the vampire sucks its own blood in a self- perpetuating cycle of dead and undead, of mortification and reanimation.
Metaphorically, Lindsay Seers indeed adopts the guise of the vampire in performing as a photographer, but literally, she is a camera. She tilts her body, calibrates her speed, waits for her moment, opens her lips – and snaps.