The Swimmers
September 11, 2008
Since starting the project while at school for his BFA, Jivraj has struggled with questions of objectification and exploitation from teachers, viewers, and himself. He admits that his first project—photographing his clients at CARE—”was atrocious” and “almost looked clinical.” Worst of all he was afraid.
“If you’ve never been in a room with 20 adults, half who can talk and half can’t, there’s noises and smells and really intense. It took me half a year to rally break through. I stopped taking my camera and really started talking to them and getting to know them.”
For his second series he tried to separate his clients from their disability. He took them out of their wheelchairs and into the woods. He says it was a naive attempt to make them look more normal, and he was still frustrated with his inability to capture his clients’ individuality.
Jivraj says The Swimmers is a new beginning for him. It features two simultaneous videos, shot from different ends of a pool, projected on a double-sided screen. In one video Jivraj’s client’s are in the foreground and everyday lane swimmers flutter kick in the back ground, while in the second video the perspective is reversed. In Jivraj’s underwater world his clients’ disabilities disappear.
“Nobody looks good swimming, everybody is floundering, and water is flying everywhere…And then you go to someone who can kick a little bit, and they kick the exact same way as someone who’s not disabled. It took me a long time to emotionally and conceptually get to this.”
After a few years working on his project, Jivraj says he’s still struggling with questions of objectification. But when things get tough he remembers when, during his first project, one woman told him nobody ever asked to take her photograph other than family. Nobody had taken the time to spend looking at her or anyone else at the school.
“Half of it I do for my own pleasure, the other half because they love doing it. They love the idea of being in a big project. We do it together. It’s a huge affair. It’s really rewarding on a personal and intellectual level.”
The Swimmers will be on display from Fri September 12th – Sat October 11th at Edmonton’s Harcourt House.
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