Featured photographer

Jo Longhurst

I am interested in Perfection: how it shapes our personal identities, and our social and political systems; and how an idea of perfection informs the history and practice of photography.

For several years I’ve been working with top breeders, photographing their dogs by bloodline, exploring their obsessive quest for the ‘perfect dog’. As part of my working process I use a variety of photographic technologies that have been used to record and control human portraits, including state-of-the-art technologies and those already considered obsolete such as stereoscopic cameras. Underpinning the work is an exploration of the effect of looking and being looked at.

My study of the Whippet foregrounds the intimate relationship between human and animal, and the increasing significance of photographic technologies in the development of human identity. Although I photograph dogs, the questions I ask are always specific to the question of what it is to be human.

Jo Longhurst has been commissioned by Pavilion to produce a new body of work for exhibition as part of the Pavilion Commissions Programme 2008.