Dogs in cages

'Dogs in Cages' was commissioned by the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, as part of a larger international exhibition ‘Confined’ and shown as part of the Look ’11 photography festival, looking at the role of photography in questioning, documenting and responding to global issues of social justice. The work was based on the reported statement: ""Treat Them Like Dogs"" by US Major General Geoffrey Miller, then head of the US prisons in Iraq and looked at the nature of incarceration, using the dog as a metaphor to address issues that surfaced regarding the treatment of prisoners in both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib detention centres. Within this work, produced in a northwest dog detention centre, it was important to establish a strong emotional connection between viewer and subject without the work falling into cliché or oversentimentality. This was achieved by using strong differential focus, focusing on the bars of the cage, to allow the inhabitant of said cage to register as a ghostlike figure in the darkness, in an attempt to move away from the dog as an individual and concentrate on the physicality of the creature, echoing human postures, movement and expression. The exhibition featured nine large-scale individual images of said dogs in cages plus a triptych. The viewer was then guided through the image sequence in a manner whereby the last image they came to, the triptych, featured a human being in the cage placed between two images of pacing dogs, representing both the confined and those guarding them. The dogs now became both prisoners and guards, with the human placed between them bringing home the reality of confinement at an explicitly human level. A full colour catalogue of Confined was published to accompany the exhibition."