Comparisons Between Gillian Wearing, Gavin Hipkins and Ann Noble

All three of the artist's that I have studied are simliar in that they all are fascinated with people and their identites. They all know photography is not simply a form of documentary, they all see how it can be used to express any idea or concept that comes to mind, how an image can have story behind it. They all are interested in people and indenties in their own different ways.
All three, Gillian Wearing, Gavin Hipkins, and Anne Noble, love working in series. These series helps them organise their ideas into sets of images. It also greatly assists the viewer in understanding these sometimes quite complex ideas by placing them within the context of the accompanying images. Wearing's work can easily be understood without the context of other images, but some of both Noble's and Hipkin's work's meaning is much harder to grasp without accompanying images.

My three artists fascination with people and identity manifests itself in different and interesting ways. Wearing is interested greatly with private lives, and the exposing of private lives in public ways. Noble is interested in the human body, the little details that come together to make us who we are, the senses we use to percieve the world around us and how photography can interact with them. Both Noble and Hipkins are very interested in upbringing, in childhood and the the environments we spend ours in. Hipkins is very interested in our community/environment and how it shapes our identity, while Noble is more interested in the actual child going through childhood. Hipkins has been called "the tourist of photography" in relation to his love of communities, especially those different from his own.
The simliarities remain, however, in methods. Both Hipkins and Noble are fans of landscape photography (unknown territory for Wearing.) Noble for example, shot two series on Antarctica, attempting to redefine an environment the public still does not know much about, an environment many see as a heroic place of...