DT: The materials implicated in your images span a wide variety of agricultural, medical, and industrial usages — they evoke the codes of safety equipment and uniforms, transport and waste disposal, food packaging and even the studio tools of photography itself. What was the process involved with selecting these intermediary materials – functional mediums that serve mostly as protective and insulating barriers — and applying them to the human body as decoration and artifice?
JN: I am obsessed by certain materials. Plastic is one of them. I like to take mundane, everyday domestic items and put them in a different context. It’s not for decoration — I’m asking questions. I’ve always been obsessed by supermarkets. The cheaper the better. I remember when I was about 14 years old and taking the labels off all the food tins in the house and putting them on my bedroom wall. I’ve no idea why. I just thought they were interesting.I began thinking about this series in 2014 when Time magazine sent me to Liberia to cover the Ebola care workers. The trip made me think about a lot of things. For this, specifically, it made me think about distancing, the duality of plastics and about human interaction. Functionality in a crisis. I saw how valuable plastics were, how the barrier PPE created was lifesaving and enabled doctors, nurses and carers to work. I will always remember one of the doctors disrobing after leaving the Ebola ward. It was a careful ritual. A meticulous choreography of purpose and safety. First this comes off, then we roll this piece over this piece, then we pull from the top down etc. Each person did their own clean up. It reduced the risk. And I looked at the PPE, that fragile yet essential thin layer of plastic that enabled health care workers to do their job. I witnessed how communal effort can unite but disease can isolate. The lack of facial recognition, the inability of family members to visit, the isolation wards, the loneliness in death. Learning to live in another man-made, made for purpose world. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, this has become more universal than ever.
DT: Less portraiture and more sculpture, the human body becomes a canvas for these other objects and layers that cover and distort the people. For you, what is the importance of revealing human features as opposed to suggesting them, exposing them or distorting them?
JN: I suppose there’s a difference between identity and character. Do we need to see the features of a person in order to identify them? Or is a suggestion enough? I think on a very basic level our brains are programmed to try to work out if we are looking at a person or an inanimate object. Do retailers, online shops, insurance companies, politicians, corporations and social media companies think of us as individuals — as their fellow citizens? Or do they think of us as consumers? As commodities? That’s a question. Capitalism works because the bottom line is about profit and loss and individuals are irrelevant. Data research attempts to use all of us to target how we all spend our money. So, how are we dealing with the new reality of being invisible? Now we are beginning to understand how things work and how we are being commodified through systems of big data and the invisible consumer.