The first shot I ever saw by Jackson Eaton was of his girlfriend Hasisi, shot from above with his cock in her mouth. His foreskin is stretched out tight, her eyes are wide. It's not particularly sexual.
In Eaton’s series Were Never Married, there are photos of the two together, curled in bed, of them laid out in swimsuits and sunglasses on summer days; Jackson, back to the camera, holding Hasisi in a doorway, her brightly coloured ankle socks and skinny legs the only part of her visible.
Eaton’s work is a rich, visual exploration of the minutiae of a relationship, documented in intense, thoughtful detail – deceptively ‘snapshot’ in style, immediate, saturated colours. Some of these pictures are hard for me to look at. They make me sad that I don’t have someone to spend endless hours doing nothing with. Putting images like these into a public forum feels, in equal parts, naïve and brave.
Naïve, because as Hasisi and Jackson recently did, people break up. But, these photos are brave for the very same reason. They are also intimate, fragile, comical and passionate. They are about love.
UHH — Tell me about your upcoming exhibition, oh +ve.
JACKSON — The exhibition is a culmination of an ongoing project. It stretches from 2007 to recently. A lot of the stuff is drawn from the Were Never Married project.
The Were Never Married project is a retrospective look on that relationship and the time I spent living in Korea. It’s quite personal and intimate, diaristic in a way. The focus of it is not just on the relationship, but also on my relationship with the city, as an outsider. It was the beginning of 2006 and I was in Perth and didn’t really know what I was doing. My friend who was living there said it was great and that I should come and live over there, so I took his advice. I didn’t move to Seoul originally, I moved to Busan, which is another big city at the other end of the country. It’s only a three-hour train ride to Seoul so I’d go up every couple of weekends. I also met this girl, Hasisi, not too long after I moved there, so I used to go up and visit her too.
Eventually I moved, and got another job. I was teaching English, obviously, it’s kind of the only way to make any money in Korea. Because of the girl, I guess, I ended up staying longer than I would have, most people stay a year or two, I stayed for nearly three, and I came back to Perth at the beginning of this year.
UHH — Did Hasisi come with you?
JACKSON — She did. We came for a holiday, and we were meant to go back to Korea, but I decided I wanted to stay here, so ... She went back.
UHH — Looking at your photography, it feels like there were almost three in the relationship – you, Hasisi and the camera.
JACKSON — Yeah, I think I really established a way of being, where the camera was always present. You know, it became part of our daily life. And in that way, people around me became used to having it there, they became comfortable with it. And there was never any question for Hasisi and I. But, there are a lot of photos that didn’t make it into that collection, that’s for sure.
UHH — What do you shoot on?
JACKSON — A variety of cameras, most of the work in that series was just on a small point and shoot film camera. It was the only camera I really had at the time, plus it was very convenient to carry around. Lately I have been trying to adopt a style and mode of photography, both in the subject matter I shoot and the way I interact with my subjects. I’ve been using more professional equipment, a medium format camera. I don’t do digital at all.
UHH — How would you describe your work?
JACKSON — I don’t feel very comfortable describing my work, not having an academic background in art. The desire for me is to portray something quite honestly, some element of my personal experience in a way that represents its true nature.
I am interested in everyday experiences, in things that are, you know, that are quite ordinary, but also things that are quite strange, or twisted within those experiences. I just feel like it’s my perspective on the world.
