turn in

Martina Mullaney brings a distinctly modernist sensibility to her photographic depictions of homelessness. Avoiding the humanist empathic pull of portraits of the under-privileged, Mullaney’s Turn In, instead studies their sleeping quarters. Her beautiful square large-scale photographs record empty beds in hostels and shelters, all photographed in the same way, side on and with details of the bedding or mattress
filling approximately the lower third of the pictures, above which are the blank expanses of different coloured walls. Hung low in the gallery so that these images of beds correspond to the height of actual beds, the photographs are given an added weight and physical presence. Unlike a lot of documentary-based photography, such work places accent on the image, no framing text or captioning augments the visual.

(extract from the essay The Trouble with Beauty, Mark Durden 2002)