BAG
A photographic installation

Photographer Ellie Brown and filmmaker Camille Thoman are collaborating on the photographic installation BAG. BAG has been featured in the online arts gazette Haha Magazine, and on Artmostfierce, collector Ruben Natal-San Miguel's widely followed arts blog.

BAG explores the duality between the way people characterize themselves in public and the private contents of their handbags. The portrait of their public face is juxtaposed with the person’s more intimate self, represented by the actual contents of their bag. BAG allows the viewer a glimpse into the private world of another individual, revealing aspects of this person’s organizational habits, vanities, occupations and preoccupations.

We are interested in portraits across age, socio-economic, gender, and race lines. We are interested in finding out what is in children’s knapsacks and what they cannot bear to part with. We are interested in what very old people carry around with them. We are interested in why people carry what they carry and how that changes among different populations. We are also interested in the ways objects are unwittingly passed between people, float in and out of people’s bag and of their lives, the objects that are unconsciously shared between us. This project takes an anthropological and sociological approach to the notion of exploring people and their attachments, as signified by the microcosm of what is in their BAG.

BAG consists of a series of 10-30 large-scale triptychs. We have shot in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York and will be moving into more rural areas of the country. Please refer to http://elliebrown.com/section/134080_BAG.html for additional samples.

The BAG triptych consists of:

Element 1:   A photograph of the subject with their bag/purse/knapsack/briefcase against a neutral background. 20x30 digital C print.

Element 2: A photograph of the original contents of the bag. The subject has laid out the object from their bag in whatever manner they see fit, as it is their curatorial space.

Element 3: Some of the actual contents of the bag/purse/knapsack/briefcase will be pinned/glued to a cork board/panel or shelf.

A BOOKLET containing the lists of all items in each bag (in the person's own words) will be available at the venue. Viewers will be able to match the bag inventories to the triptychs and know what the items are that they are viewing, providing a vibrant, interactive experience of the exhibit.