Tracey Emin - Work - Photography

Photography

Emin has produced many photographic works throughout her career, including Monument Valley (Grand Scale) (1995–97) and Outside Myself (Monument Valley, reading ‘Exploration of the Soul’) (1995) which resulted "from a trip Emin made to the United States in 1994. She and her then boyfriend, the writer, curator and gallerist Carl Freedman, drove from San Francisco to New York stopping off along the way to give readings from her book, Exploration of the Soul 1994. The photograph shows the artist sitting in an upholstered chair in Monument Valley, a spectacular location on the southern border of Utah with northern Arizona, holding her book. Although it is open, it is not clear whether she is looking at the viewer or at the text in front of her. Emin gave her readings sitting in the chair, which she had inherited from her grandmother, which also became part of Emin's art, There's A Lot Of Money In Chairs (1994)."

Other photographic works include a series of nine images comprising the work Naked Photos – Life Model Goes Mad (1996) documenting a painting performance Emin made in a room specially built in Galleri Andreas Brändström, Stockholm. Another photographic series, Trying On Clothes From My Friends (She Took The Shirt Off His Back) (1997), shows the artist trying on her friends’ clothes offering up questions of identity.

Other works such as I've Got It All (2000) show Emin with her "legs splayed on a red floor, clutching banknotes and coins to her crotch. Made at a time of public and financial success, the image connects the artist’s desire for money and success and her sexual desire (her role as consumer) with her use of her body and her emotional life to produce her art (the object of consumption)". Whilst Sometimes I Feel Beautiful (2000) pictures Emin lying alone in a bath. Both these works are examples of Emin using "large-scale photographs of herself to record and express moments of emotional significance in her life, frequently making reference to her career as an artist. The photographs have a staged quality, as though the artist is enacting a private ritual."

Emin's most iconic are the two self portraits taken inside her famous beach hut, The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here I (2000) and The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here II (2000). The latter two photographs are a diptych although they are often exhibited and sold separately. They depict a naked Emin on her knees inside her beach hut which she and friend Sarah Lucas had bought in Whitstable, Kent in 1992. The hut itself later became the sculpture The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here (The Hut) (1999). They are part of museum collections including Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom) and have been mass produced as postcards sold in museum shops around the world.