GBP 15.00
Found on American classifieds website, Craigslist, the photographs selected by Plunkett for the artist book Special Friend are chosen for the appearance of dogs in entries typically sourced from California and Nevada. Plunkett trolls the ‘for sale’ section of the website for often subtle and surprising companions.
These photographs are accompanying entries for cars, antiques and the like. They are often the outcome of speed – short and swift smartphone snapping sessions. These photographs are entangled with the dreams and desires already propagated through the world of advertising as well as the long-standing tropes of the American cowboy and the openness of the land. The book includes essays by curator Kari Rittenbach and art historian Gabriella Nugent. The series engages the way in which visions of certain geographies subconsciously endure and our projections onto these spaces: Plunkett challenges the stability of photographs, by a collection of dogs endearingly dedicated to their owners.
“In her direct appropriation of publicly available amateur imagery — picturing dogs, specifically — Plunkett also subverts the firsthand view of documentary photography by negating its strategy of revelation, and without ever glancing through a camera lens. What is pictured is secondary. Rather than critically exposing any logic inherent to our twisted historical relationship to the dog, Plunkett concentrates our view onto a particular sort of reality-based, user-generated material, in which the presence of the dog is, in fact, residual.” - Kari Rittenbach
Megan Plunkett: Special Friend was published by Emalin, London, in 2018.