Forgotten, discarded, orphaned, lost; stolen, bought, discovered or found; the vernacular images in Help Me are culled from Gillian McCain’s extensive collection of photographs in formats including tin-types, cabinet cards, Polaroids, and snapshots.
With an eye for the peculiar, McCain and co-curator Megan Cump, present a selection of images that bring together criminals, patients, ghosts and other assorted misfits. In and out of touch with their surroundings, often performing human experiments, usually on the brink of disaster— these images frequently leave viewers scratching their heads and asking: exactly who is it that needs help? Is it the subject, the photographer, the viewer themselves, or some poor soul off-camera?
Shot in cheap hotel rooms, prisons, asylums, war-zones and ordinary homes, these images are often inexplicable and foreboding, but not without humor. Whether it’s a girl about to be swallowed by an amusement park whale, convicts posturing for a Polaroid to send to the folks back home, or an accident waiting to happen, these often private and always anonymous photographs haunt us with their alluring beauty and the strange poetry of the “found.”
