Feature

ONO

Natasha Caruana posed as a bride-to-be and contacted women selling their wedding dresses online. She asked for high-res copies of their photographs: images made to validate a ceremony and recycled as small ads. The antithesis of the trophy wedding album, ONO focuses on the discarded props of the fairytale production and finds unintended meaning in carefully staged images. With their faces obscured for privacy, bride, groom and entourage become masked performers acting out emblematic scenes. Their personal stories and reasons for sale are left to the imagination.
 

Natasha Caruana

Caruana is a practising artist, lecturer of photography and founder of the London based studioSTRIKE artists studios. She graduated from an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in 2008 and is currently a lecturer of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey.

Caruana’s own art practise is grounded in research, drawing from archives, the Internet and personal narratives. Her series ‘The Other Woman’ and ‘Married Man’ documents love and life of the everyday. Caruana’s works have been exhibited in various group shows, such as Invisible Adversaries, alongside Francesco Goya and John Constable and The Fool at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary of Art, Sunderland. Previous group and solo exhibitions have been in the USA, Poland, Germany and Saudi Arabia. Her work is held in the collections of the British Library, Woman’s Library in the UK and The Kinsey Institute in the United States.

Her work was shortlisted for the National Magazine Award, the Deutsche Bank Pyramid prize in 2008 and was featured in the Royal Photographic Society Journal, the British Journal of Photography. In 2011 she was selected by the Humble Arts Foundation as one of 18 leading female art photographers working in the UK.

www.natashacaruana.com

Caruana's book 'ONO' is published by HERE press

'Married Men & Other Stories' currently exhibiting at Photofusion, Brixton, London