At once there is an unrelenting animosity towards notions of privacy and the law! This photographic content that sees the artist penetrate the domestic fortress, pre-empts our current tendency towards the legal implications of Big Brother styled living conditions. Is this not the artist herself? With the discretion of a tabloid she imposes a lens a lot longer than the paparazzi that follow high-priced movie stars. She is the imposter who submits these subjects to the dictates of her viewer’s subjective gaze. Is this not Portraiture itself? Yet she has imposed herself long before the subjects have gathered a respectable demeanour. No, they are caught-out and sprung, thus seemingly cloaking the artist and revealing themselves as the prominent picture of deceit and worry.
The sense is of domestic tabloid. These are disturbing revelations. The familial environments are orchestrated with cunning detail: pale, sad chickens amidst religious teacups used as vases. Over-zealous parents and teenage dramas. Are we supposed to feel that these people are predisposed to follow the dictates of conventional values that traditionally emanate at childhood? There is a striking amount of content relating to the coming of age; teenage years are rendered with a striking frankness. This is a class that is distinct and by their nature private and confidential. None of these photos traverse the domestic sphere. The subject matter often seems deliberately familiarized. Expressions are mirrored; groceries and appliances reappear in different physical locations. The sentiment is often reapplied so as to suggest the synonymity of culture.
The familial environments, fictionalised as they are, cannot properly be called intrusive or invasive; indeed they come nowhere close to that familiar Orwellian lexicon and they do not flout any of our prized legal rights. Yet because of the sanctity placed on familial privacy the photos seem dangerously revealing. They therefore present an interesting subtext amongst so-called New Zealand documentary photography (need we consider that relationship). Documentary photography was deliberately unadorned and real and so often called journalistic. There were no quirks of style that Mason fashions. Her subjects glow behind orange lights and are composed with the highest religious sensibility. Despite letting notions of truth yearn to more fictive concepts like cinematography, Mason is still journalistic. Rather than the ‘moment’ we have unwinding narratives and a compelling sense of what is beyond the photograph.
Jerome Webby 2010