An unusual arts project with a serious message has rolled into Perth.
American photographer Sean Blake has touched down in the Fair City, with an Ikea-bought chair under his arm.
“It’s funny walking down the street and the reactions you get,” he said. “People just don’t expect to see a big Texan walking around with a red chair.”
Sean’s Untitled Chair Project has taken him across the world. He has travelled through America, Italy, India and the United Emirates taking pictures of willing models, posing with his beloved piece of furniture.
The 48-year-old will be in Scotland for about a month, setting up pictures and stopping people in the street.
The project is an unusual way for Sean to highlight the importance of bone marrow donations, after he lost a close friend to leukaemia.
“My best friend Doug Dietze was diagnosed back in the 1990s,” he said. “We were exceptionally close and when he started losing his hair through chemotherapy, I shaved my head to show him he wasn’t going through this by himself.”
A few years after Doug died, Sean was living in Dubai and heard about a local girl who was looking for a bone marrow match.
“I found out there was a culture out there, where people shied away from speaking about anything negative. If you talk about the devil, the devil will appear, that kind of mentality.
“I thought I needed a way to get people talking, something that could reach the masses.”
He devised the chair project, using a cheap Diana camera adapted to take Polaroid snaps.
Sean takes 10 pictures of each participant with the chair – “they can do what they want with it, the only rule is they don’t look at the camera” – and asked them to pick their favourite. The subject is then asked to share the image, and the bone marrow message, on social media.
“It has the potential to reach hundreds, maybe thousands, of people each time,” he said.
Sean is planning an exhaustive tour of Britain and mainland Europe.
“The plan is to go from place to place in an classic motorcyle and sidecar,” he said. “I have already reached out to Triumph and they seem very interested.
“I’m in the process of trying to secure sponsorship and funding for the tour.”
He said: “I’ve already spent seven years working on this and I plan to keep going until a cure is found.”
To learn more about bone marrow donations, visit the Anthony Nolan charity’s website.
