Dining Room (Francis Place) I-III

Sarah Jones' portraits of teenage girls in upscale English country homes are more closely related to painting than photography. In these still, mannered compositions, the girls are posed in relation to objects and furniture, such as a Chinese soup tureen, antique wooden tables and a carriage clock. Like these objects, the girls are presented in a cool, objective manner, never looking directly into the camera and standing or sitting in stiff, almost unhuman poses. Ironically, although seemingly based on Old Master paintings, the photographs have a radical feeling to them, as though the artist were making a subtle statement about the way that women continue to be treated as objects long after the radicalism of early feminism has become all but obsolete.