Exhibition Review:

The Age M Magazine, May 2008
There Stands The Glass, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
by Penny Modra

Disclaimer: I love Conor O'Brien’s photographs. So much so that I forwent rent and a leather jacket to buy Backyard, from his 2007 Westside Series. The question, in the terrifying property market and leather-clad fashion climate, is why? The pictures, like Proust’s biscuit, seem to be about people and their memories and feelings, without necessarily focusing on people, memories or feelings. And they’re about O'Brien himself, but without forcibly expressing his sense of self. There Stands The Glass, following on from Westside and Hold On To Each Other, shifts further away from portraits to capture spaces where people have been, or are about to enter. Though not staged, the images have been chosen (some using garish flash) - they don’t efface the act of photographing. He’s not asking you to look through his eyes as though they’re your own and share some modernist “epiphany” moment. It’s just an invitation to feel, well, what you feel.