Le Monde
Kate Mellor talks about Une Semaine de Bonheur (A Week of Happiness):
"Like the work Close to Home this is a personal project and represents an attempt to document what is near to me. I took the photographs while on holiday with friends and family in Provence and Normandy. It's the story of quite ordinary people in search of happiness. I deliberately chose to use the photographic vernacular of the holiday snap because this is a genre of photography that is accessible to most but is generally not given any significance as a photographic document.
I inkjet printed these images onto the newspapers that I read at the time in the locality where I was. The, rather ironic, title makes a reference to the Surrealist artist Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté, a work of collage that he made by cutting up images from popular journals while on a three week holiday in Maloja in 1936. Ernst's work propels us into a dreamlike world in which meaning is never quite fixed, where it breaks up, dissolves and reforms due to chance associations. His work has this unsettling quality of portent. I've borrowed from this by putting my images on the newspaper pages in a fairly loose, haphazard way - making use of the chancy collisions between my photographs about the unnewsworthy nature of our holiday snaps and the 'important' historic documentation of the newspapers. It's like a contemporary method of collage. I like the way that the juxtapositions make you re-read both the insignificant photographs of the escapist (therefore seen to be somewhat meaningless and banal) experience of the annual family vacation and the newspaper stories or information.
I've photographed subject matter that a person on holiday with their family might engage with. The look of the images can be quite confusing and ambiguous - there is supposed to be a deliberate withholding of resolution and closure. I'm aiming more at transience and instability and chaos. We don't know if the family will be happy because at any chancy and haphazard moment their position could shift from non-event to event, from the triviality of the holiday snap to the historic document of the news story.
I made this work in 2001 and it is quite interesting to look back and see that the work also functions as a comment about the global and local - the G8 anti-globalisation demonstrations were taking place at the time. The newspapers are, of course, fading. That's in the nature of it."
Libération