It takes more than one picture to tell the story, reports Charles Hutchinson.

IMPRESSIONS Gallery, York, presents the first British solo show by San Franciscan artist Laurie Long, who goes Undercover to explore childhood memory, identity, role-play and surveillance in everyday life through photography and video.

Blondes have more fun, as the saying goes, and certainly that was the impression given by Nancy Drew mystery books that were to be an early influence on Laurie. For two years, she dyed her hair Titian blonde, Nancy's shade, for a 1996 project entitled Becoming Nancy Drew.

She painstakingly created a series of self-portraits using photography to recreate drawings from the books, and each placing Laurie as Nancy within the story, with an accompanying caption from the illustrations.

To complete the triptych, Long has added a pinhole photograph presenting an alternative, blurred view of the same scene, adding mystery, suspense and a sense of fear as humour fuses with feminism and popular culture.

"The process of physically altering myself to assume another identity was very profound," Long says.

"For two years I was virtually and literally someone else. Strangely enough, this transformation revealed a constructed identity that for me captured my 'real' self."

Like most artists, Long works another job to finance her art, and she is so busy working two jobs that she has no time in her schedule for romance...unless she could make it into an art project.

In 1998, she did exactly that, setting up the Dating Surveillance Project out of a belief that dating paralleled a private detective on a spying mission.

She filmed her own dates, wearing a hidden video camera and microphone concealed within her coat. Some men knew they were being filmed, others dates asked specifically to be filmed, others were unaware.

The dates had all the usual pauses, bull, play acting and discomfort, but shown surveillance style in grainy black and white, the men make you cringe even more.

The Long run ends on June 18.

Updated: 16:31 Thursday, May 05, 2005