Shelley Corcoran
b. 1976, Ireland
I worked within the airline company Ryanair for five years while doing my photography degree. I was a reservation agent, which involved booking flights, changing flights, etc, over the phone. During the last two years I photographed those around me, including myself.
The call centre is normally the first human contact that many people have with Ryanair. Yet, for customers, staff in a call centre do not seem to be ‘real’ because of the fact that the public never gets to see their faces. Working in a call centre such as this makes you invisible. You become just a name at the end of the phone. And what is in a name? After all, ‘a rose by any other name still smells as sweet’. A passenger may be talking to you one day, and the next day speak to someone else and not notice the difference.
I wanted to make the invisible visible by photographing them. None of the individual images is titled with the name of the person because I wanted to make this purely about the visual, the opposite to what the call centre is about. There is also a blank space in the centre of the work when hung, to represent invisibility.
In this visually obsessed world, nothing exists unless we can see it. We as a society are bombarded day after day with images, in advertising billboards, on buses, in magazines. Something or someone that is unseen becomes inconsequential.
(Text: a sense of place catalogue, 2007)
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