| Through my art I explore the relationship between the body and identity while raising questions regarding the status of photography in a digital age. I seek to question the basic assumption that the self is distinct from the other, to portray physical identity and psychological identity as unstable and permeable. I present the body not as a protective envelope that defines and unifies our limits, but as an organ of physical and psychological interchange between bodies and selves. Identity is seen not as something necessarily innate, as traditionally conceived, but rather as the product of interaction with the other. In my work the body is presented as ambiguous and fluid, its boundaries in doubt. | 
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Antony Crossfield
Antony Crossfield, Foreign Body 3, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.Through my art I explore the relationship between the body and identity while raising questions regarding the status of photography in a digital age.
I seek to question the basic assumption that the self is distinct from the other, to portray physical identity and psychological identity as unstable and permeable. I present the body not as a protective envelope that defines and unifies our limits, but as an organ of physical and psychological interchange between bodies and selves. Identity is seen not as something necessarily innate, as traditionally conceived, but rather as the product of interaction with the other. In my work the body is presented as ambiguous and fluid, its boundaries in doubt. I hope to highlight how our experience of the body is mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies. To suggest that the body is no longer the space that secures the idea of self, but rather it is the domain where the self is contested and called into question.
Photography is a particularly appropriate medium to investigate the unstable and changeable nature of the body. Photography once appeared to provide us with causally generated “truthful” records of things in the world in fixed and stable images. It reinforced the Cartesian idea of a disembodied self, capable of attaining certain knowledge from a stable viewpoint. In the digital age these old certainties of photography have faded and its definition has shifted toward a medium that is infinitely mutable, unstable, and fragmented, mirroring the characteristics of ambiguity and fluidity I wish to highlight in the corporeality and identities of my subjects.
My photographs are constructed in a manner closer to the manual labor of painting. Taken from several points of view, composed of multiple shots, compressing several instances into a single frame, they are compositions of unified fragments. The sense of an illusory wholeness masking a fractured and uncertain reality is embedded in the structure of the photographs and functions as a metaphor for the illusion of wholeness in the fragmented self. Embracing all the diversity and flaws of the body normally erased through digital imaging, I aim to trigger a visceral response in the viewer and to engage them physically as well as intellectually.
Mind and body, self and other, inside and outside, painting and photography, fiction and reality: through my photography I hope to question these supposed opposites, blurring the boundaries between them.
