The photographs in these newspapers document a series of public engagements and were shot over several days of roaming each city. Passers-by were asked to consider a list of people in situations, taken from news stories in the previous day’s local newspaper (Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds, The West Australian in Perth and The Daily Telegraph in Sydney).
Participants were invited to choose a situation and embody it, right there and then, on the street, for camera. They could choose to be anyone — female, male, young or old, dead or alive, a politician, a sports star, a do-gooder, a perpetrator or victim of a crime. Some decided to step outside of their identity, others had a personal reason for selecting a particular situation, which resonated with their own life experiences.
How they ‘be’ that person and echo that situation on the street was negotiated, using the chosen caption as a performance instruction and starting point. Each photograph documents the intervention on the street.
All the resulting images are brought together in a full colour tabloid newspaper, accompanied by each chosen caption. and distributed by newsagents, vendors and venues across the city.These offer a combined portrait of the cities, and a troubling and at times humourous re-animation of the written word — after considering the circumstances of others, often skipped over when reading a newspaper.