Images and Artist Statement by Nur Aishah Kenton
This piece was originally published in ‘Pleasure and Danger’, Bossy’s 2020 print edition.
About the Artist
(Nur) Aishah Kenton grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Aishah graduated from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2018), where she majored in photography at the School of Art and Design.
Artist’s Statement
It never occurred to me that photography could exist so close to home. I never realised that photographs made in my one-bedroom rented apartment could lead to a body of work. But in 2017, I fell in love, and with that love came a new way of seeing and appreciating my own environment. This book is about the love I have for my partner and the love we share for photography. With cameras strewn around the apartment, both of us would grab them at any moment and make pictures of anything we felt like. It is the intimate and hard to apprehend details that give life its texture. The seemingly mundane moments create the fabric of our experience. Using 355mm black and white film, we photographed each other in the kitchen, the living room, at the dinner table, in the bathroom and bedroom; nothing was off-limits. Over the course of a year, we shot close to 100 rolls of film in the apartment and this book is a testament to the time we have spent together. In making this book, I have used images that my partner and I made, but the processing, editing, and sequencing were all done by myself. In some ways, it is certainly a collaboration; however, it is also a book that I have directed, like a screenplay. This is my life, our life, and it’s just the beginning.
