Jessica Dimmock - The Ninth Floor

Locuslux Gallery in Brussels is proud to announce the first Belgian exhibition of internationally acclaimed series The Ninth Floor by photojournalist Jessica Dimmock.

Opening Reception Saturday January 31, 2009 14-19h

About the artist:

Jessica Dimmock (USA, 1978) lives in Brooklyn, New York.

She is a graduate of The International Center of Photography. Her work has appeared in Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Fortune, New York Magazine, The British Journal of Photography and Fader. In 2005 she completed the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism program at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Jessica received a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology/Anthropology and a Master’s degree in Education.

The Ninth Floor received both the Inge Morath Award from Magnum Photo’s, the Marty Forscher Fellowship for Documentary Photography from PDN/Parsons and the Juror’s Choice Award for the Project Competition from the Santa Fe Center for Photography.

With this series, Jessica Dimmock also won the first edition of the prestigious F Award for Concerned Photography from Forma and Fabrica. In the winter of 2008, Jessica became a member of the VII Network, a division of the VII Photo agency.

About ‘The Ninth Floor’:

Jessica Dimmock began photographing her series ‘The Ninth Floor’ after being approached by a New York City drug dealer several years ago. She was in the midst of completing her degree at the International Center of Photography and Photojournalism. She became interested in photographing the dealer and his daily deliveries. One such stop was the ninth-floor of an elegant apartment building in New York’s Flat Iron district.

For almost three years, Dimmock followed the lives of the people living in this apartment. They are addicts, whose everyday lives are filled with buying and selling drugs, sleeping, rowing and having sex. When she was a child, Dimmock’s father also went through a period of rather intense addiction. Her sense of recognition gave her a special connection to this lonely, isolated community. Film is a big influence on Dimmock’s work. Her cinematic sensibility is clearly evident in the way she portrays the interior space of the apartment. The minimal and often layered lighting accentuates the sense of unease that The Ninth Floor exudes. She shot her pictures using only the available lighting; the light of the television screen or a mobile phone. Dimmock’s focus on the emotional and social side of the inhabitants’ lives resulted in a series of intense and innovative images with an intimate and unpolished feel.

‘…the mood was muffled, slow, secretive and sick, becalmed by a septic hush’, Dimmock recalls, and through her vidid portrait of that decaying place, with no light and duct-taped walls indeed silences its voyeur, it is her relentless documentation of the human lives struggling through and surviving addition that impact us so profoundly.

Caught between the unaffected, objective nature of journalism and the heart-felt feelings for her subjects, Dimmock reflects how, ‘…the strange contradictions of this work are such that a mutual trust is built… but that very trust eventually undermines the arms-length neutrality of the documentarian’.

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (NL) en Kunsthaus Dresden (D) showed her work in 2008.

Locuslux Gallery works with Forma (Italy) to bring this series for the first time to Belgium.

A selection of more than forty chromogenic prints will be exhibited at Locuslux Gallery in Brussels.

The book The Ninth Floor is published by Contrasto and available at the gallery and on line.

Sneak Preview of Paparazzi!

Jessica Dimmock’s new series ‘Paparazzi!’ will preview at Locuslux. This is the worldwide debute of this new series of Jessica Dimmock.

Paparazzi! explores the ghoulish fascination with celebrity images and looks at the men that create these photographs. The project pays close attention to the highly sexualised relationship between photographer and photographed, and examines the hunter/prey dynamic between the two. At its core, this project strikes at the heart of what is to be an American in the current time. Never before has there been such fascination, interest and obsession with the everyday occurrences of Hollywood starts, nor has it ever been so profitable. As editorial magazines and newspapers go out of business, celebrity magazines pack the shelves and are amongst the only forms of print making any money.

Jessica Dimmock - The Ninth Floor