WORDS ON MY OWN WORK
August 29th 2011
I am sure I have mentioned earlier my thoughts on most photographs lacking everything but the obvious superficial surface. I believe for a photographer to succeed properly, even for a commercial one, that the photographs HAVE to include something more than just the pretty light.
It probably seems wrong of me to start discussing this as most my work are portraits of people with just a simple idea that endorse the aesthetics and do not really say anything more than that. But I wish to, in this blogpost to write about some of my personal work - which I want to state that I do seperate from my commercial portraits as this is where I want to express myself more clearly.
The work that I wish to write to you about are my twisted portraits, that probably look like they have been photoshopped or double exposures, but they are not. Again, I do not believe that it is the technical sides of the image that speaks for it and it is not needed to discuss in this matter.
This work is an exploration of the beautiful and the sublime. Investigating fashion photography as the contemporary sublime. I wanted to work with fashion photography and did tests and shoots for other students, and then it developed in to gallery-work based on following theory:
Edmund Burke writes about beauty in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) as qualities such as balance, smootheness, and colour, and about the sublime as vastness and terror. To him these terms are opposites of eachother.
Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790) states that the sublime aestethics can only be associated with nature, because it no artist intentionally created it with a purpose. It has been created without meaning, yet is subjectivly meaningful. The natural sublime has no purposivly effect on the viewer.
In Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999) Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is discussing a more current view on the beautiful and the sublime. Gilbert-Rolfe writes that the sublime can no longer be found in nature, it can only be created by technology. Nature is limited and finite, while technology is limitless. The sublime has to be limitless in order to be vast and grand.
When I started my work I was inspired by the defragmented and tormented portraits by Francis Bacon said by some to look horrifying, and by others to look beautiful.
Francis Bacon
Bacon’s portraits are on flat colored backgrounds, while the foreground are treated with the richeness of colours and forms that is all the denser. Looking at a picture of a face we start to analyze the identity of the person. Juxtaportions, defragmented, tormented portraits could be described as no longer to be beautiful, but it is still the same person - the kind, beautiful person - but with a distorted face. The richness of colours are ment to illustratre that beauty. The distortion of visual beauty creates an experience of vastness and terror, as Edmund Burke describes as sublime. It is no longer in balance or smooth, and becomes horrifying to the viewer.
Fashion photographer Glen Luchford collaborated with painter Jenny Saville on a series of huge tablaux photographs in 1995-96 called Closed Contact. The series confronts and challenges conceived notions of feminine beauty. To me, what inspires me the most by this work is the collusion of the art and fashion world. A fashion photographer who on a regular basis photographs models ment to sell products and lifestyles, photographs these unconventional and provocative portraits of Jenny Saville. The question I ask myself is; at what point of distortion is the image no longer a portrait or a fashion image, but a result of a meaning the inflicts art?
Glen Luchford and Jenny Saville
Closed Contact can be related to Bacon’s brutal paintings, stroked by the colour of flesh. There is a sense of a confrontation with the viewer into examining one’s own body and the grotesqueries and beauties inherent within. The work is in many ways sublime; the images offer an experience of discomfort and terror, because of the way the normal human is transformed by the spreading of the shape beyond what we understand as normal.
The obvious and most important difference from Bacon’s painting is that Luchford and Saville’s work are photographs. Photography being a product of technology, a limitless product said by Gilbert-Rolfe to be sublime.
The contemporary view on the sublime favour only beauty as an abstract term, and not in terms of ideals and natural aesthetics.
In the eighteenth century landscape painting, beauty is the ideal landscape. The paintings which are strongly painted with contrasts, reality striking on the ideal, are picturesque. The sublime paintings are those of vastness. Mountains, valleys, huge storms. It is the terrifying overwhelming experience that defines the sublime paintings.
Today it is the technology that is a production of vastness and terror, not paintings of mountains. The commercial world, the world of fashion working with technology that is so powerful that it can enhance life i.e. video, the colours, the contrasts - it is nothing compared to the way we see life. The ideal beauty of it becomes terrifying. As with mainpulation, seduction, all these grand powers of the world of fashion that is bigger than real life. It is limitless, continuesly. The technology creates a distorted picture of perfection.
Photography function as a counter to contemporary painting in terms of the sublime.
This way of using photography to photograph something horrifying and disturbing, to later be described as beautiful (but as I have stated with theory it is really not beautiful, but sublime), as in Irving Penn’s still life pictures, Diane Arbus’ photographs of «freaks» or Luchford and Saville’s Closed Contacts was what inspired my work.
My work has been shot as a fashion editorial, and then the two shown photographs has been chosed to represent something more meaningful. In fashion the sitter is not as important as what is being advertised. It implies that the sitter is not important, in the photographs they are no longer whole, they look worn out.
I wish to bring this back to Francis Bacon and what I wrote about eventhough you look at a defragmented painting of a face, there is still that beauitful person in it.
An important factor in my work has been Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1988) where his character Agnes questions the face ability to identify who we are. In Bacon’s work bewildement sets in trying to look at his work and find relation between the face and the being. The surface of my work explores the relationship between the face and the being. Isolated on a flat studio background, the girls both look at themselves in the shattered mirror - not confronting a camera, but them selves as defragmented and distorted. The faces are fading, almost duplicating, but are never able to seperate from the being as it is two united terms that describes and identifies who we are. Dualism, as illustrated by Robert L. Stevenson as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in his novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), where the two sides of Dr. Jekyll is fundamentally different substances that exist independently, but they both rely on eachother to function.
As in the debate of the body/face and the being.
A sitter does not see oneself as seen by others. The subject has only inner experiences or fragmented outer views of his or her body. One need someone else to define them, someone from an outer point of view. Being alone in the frame, with no one other to prove their existences in the world refuses them to be whole, it implies a lack of self.
The shattered girls are represented as beautiful by the aesthetics, the beautiful light, the warm intense colours as painted with brush strokes on the grey mute background. The technology brings it further, into the sublime. They are no longer beautiful «objects», instead they are a sublime abstract representation.
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