Come Closer Closer Please

‘Come Closer, Closer Please’ is a book of photographs taken by Leigh Johnson over a decade. To look through Leigh Johnson’s viewfinder is to see the world as a series of awkward angles, both physical and psychological. Although they range from guilelessly straightforward to layered to the point of indeterminacy, her images derive from a singular, distinctive point of view. Whatever the qualities of her surfaces, her sensibility is consistently off kilter. A typical Johnson image lays bare an uncomfortably intimate moment. She fixes events that we might prefer to be fleeting and so holds attention upon objects and situations that make us flinch. She induces our collusion in her practice of invasion, not only into the lives of others, but also into her own: the out of focus face of a mildly discomfited child and an unguarded teenager swigging from a carton sit alongside the remains of a meal that looks to be better left uneaten and a moment from a holiday that suggests more agony than ecstasy. The large part of Johnson’s pictures are snatched, yet it is her compositions that are most revealing of her relationship with her subjects. Even while they perform for her, she refuses them the resolution of their moment. Instead she lets them hover in an instant either immediately before or just after, and, in doing so, creates punctured narratives that allow her anxieties to flow unchecked across her entire body of work. She is held by a fraught identification with not only the people, but also the things that she photographs. The key image in this selection is the double portrait of herself and her lover grafted together by the angle of the mirrors on a cupboard door to become a wary, sexless hybrid. Ostensibly an image of unification, the image actually documents the mundane catastrophe of a broken relationship. Arranging her pictures in a constellation that slides between harmony and dissonance, Johnson adopts a diaristic approach. Multiple tales can be traced across these walls. Domesticity, work and travel, everyday life and adventure, beauty and disgust all sit side by side. Above all, there is a love story, told in fragments, that is pitilessly honest while being characteristically oblique.