But they do share anthropological characteristics with Jim Speers' photographs of hotel interiors. Jim Speer's West Plaza and Glenbervie Suite photographs are of function rooms, designed for instructive or entertaining inhabitation. Bland and commodified, these rooms are flexible and seamless sites that function without intruding on the users' consciousness, each interchangeable with the other. Behind the silence of these secluded spaces, operates the mechanisms of invisible service industries. As the real is both familiar and strange, seen and unseen, it is distanced and displaced from the viewer by the photo's surface.
Abstraction can be a tool to both withhold and make proximate photographic realism.
These images are selected from a larger series, itself a narrative that is deliberately incompletely pictured, as if frames have been cut at intervals from a spool of film. Each image is part of an event that is neither reality or illusion and threatens to both coaless, or fade out, of focus. In these scenes, the viewer is again a voyeur but this time there is no focal point as the details remain uncertain. Neate's work is filmic and transient, seeming to arrest by chance moments of flux. His images resist resolution and definition, encouraging the possibility of visual knowledge that has the potential to resolve but never can.