Self-portrait – Camera Obscura

Hudson River pt 1, by Charles Harry

Charles Harry — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 06:48:40 +0000

Text and photos by Charles Harry.

Today I died. Today I was reborn.

YADA fucking Yada.

I lost all control today. And with it I lost all responsibility for myself.

But only today have I ever really had any control over my life.

The control of having no self control.

I have spent my half-life trying to carve my name into the world, and plan all my journeys and adventures. But with unrealistically high expectations I would always miss my mark.

But If I made my goals to hit rock bottom. To leave and feed off the crumbs of the deprived. To lie down, and to break down. To lose myself and to suffer.

That is what Hudson River is. That is what I am.

I got down on my knees and begged my friends to help me. I cried and screamed and wailed. I literally had no ability to look after myself.

Every time I lay down I began to choke and suffocate on my slimy chunky vomit. My friends took turns watching me while I slept. Little did they know they were actually watching me fall apart.

From time to time I would go to the mirror and attempt to photograph my insanity. All my life I have been obsessed with documenting things, and if I were to die or better yet go insane, I wanted to at least attempt to capture it in some shape or form.

This is the first photo I took of my death. It was taken literally straight after I had ended my 25-minute crying tantrum.
© Charles Harry
Please visit Hudson River pt 1, by Charles Harry for the full size image.

My collapse was no longer about being high. I was so far gone, and so close to a more figurative death than ever, that I watched my entire future crumble around me. I saw the end of not only my life, but also my career, my connection with friends and family -everything.

I contemplated living as a bum my whole life, no real connection with reality just my camera and me. If my entire reputation were to crumble that day, if no business or organization were ever to hire me, if my family were to disown me or worse try to help me and prevent me from exploring this deep dark place, there would literally be nothing else better to do but suffer more, struggle more, and capture it using a stupid plastic machine.

I told my caretakers of my dreams and aspirations. Or more aptly put my ‘back-up plan’. They had heard so much already from me. So many desperate pleas and screams. They told me that it wouldn’t come to that. That I wouldn’t have to live my life like that. That I would be OK.

But I told them that, that was unimportant. Whether I succeed or fail in life didn’t matter. Through success or suffering I would be able to maintain some sort of foothold in the art world and that was all I really cared about.

This time they acknowledged my ramblings in the affirmative. Many might say that they were just trying to entertain my illusions for the sake of maintaining my current complacent state. But I know they believed in me. I know that they believed that no matter where I was, or how much I fucked up in some shape or form I would have a voice.

As I took more photos, I began to grow lost and unclear again. Something I only see now in retrospect. The initial photo I took was meant to illustrate my strife and suffering. As the photos progressed though I feel into another hole, much different to my previous one. I was obsessed hiding behind the camera. Creating a silhouette of myself in any shape and form. Like the stupid vulnerable junkie that I was, I was no longer to look at myself through my lens and I took to hiding. It was taken literally straight after I had ended my 25-minute crying tantrum. Eventually I grew too weak and I asked to be laid down in my bed. I gave the camera to blue jay, and I asked him to take photos of me. If this was to be my death, in body or spirit, I did not want to waste a second of it undocumented.

Hudson river lying in bed.© Charles Harry
Please visit Hudson River pt 1, by Charles Harry for the full size image.

The first photo was taken of me lying down in bed. Every time I closed my eyes however, I suffered long nasty chocking fits on my bile, and would end up running to the basin or finding a nearby packet to release it in. These successions of actions lead blue jay to my basin, where he began to photograph my mental breakdown in liquid form.

Barring the three people in charge of my care, nobody will ever know of this day. And nobody will ever know about Hudson River.

I have a choice now.

I can learn from today, live (and learn) from it every single day.

I can chase my dreams, like far reaching kites, across the globe. Always in my horizons, never in my hands.

Or, I can fail. I can suffer, and fail, and lose everything I have. And in that failure.

That vile depravity.

Those seconds of time where I am most weak. Most frail. Least sane. I can succeed. I can succeed in my mission to fail. I can flop around and suffocate anywhere I want like a fish out of water. And I can document it.

I don’t want your sympathy or hatred. I don’t want to be understood. I don’t want to have to explain who I am using other than the words and photos on this page. I just want to capture and document my life, be it through the medium of success or failure- I don’t care.

In a world as heartless and greedy as this, it really isn’t that hard to be an idiot.

The strength of Hudson River lies in his ability to die. He knows he is doomed, yet he marches at the front of this parade, triumphantly singing battle hymes till his very last breath. It is because of this that Hudson River can never lose. Because as a betting man, he is betting against himself. His plan is flawless.

All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions

Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 06:18:58 +0000

Text and photos by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

One photograph is a fluke, and the photographer is a purveyor of flukes.

When I first started out in photography, I would think that I was not a real photographer because I felt like each of my images was a ‘fluke’. A fluke that I didn’t feel I knew, fully, how I actually achieved. In terms of lighting, posing, compositing – everything would feel almost arbitrary, especially as I was on both sides of the lens making self-portraits, often composing the shots blind. I would wait for the dawning of each ‘fluke’ feeling frustrated for all the substandard shots in between that gave me the nagging feeling that I wasn’t a real artist.

Sedimental: A picture we shot in 1 minute…
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

I’ve learnt that this feeling is actually the normal mentality of an artist (whether or not I was a real ‘photographer’ in the most physical professional sense was more down to whether I made money from photography.) But I began to realise that to be an artist, you just have to create art, irrespective of how great or not it might seem to others. From day one of creating art, we are ‘artists’. My thoughts have since evolved to entertain the notion that all photography is somewhat about flukes, about luck and chance, and I refer to all genres of photography. Before this comment is taken as dismissive of skill and talent, I will explain what I mean. Some genres involve more luck than others; for example, shooting the perfect image of a bird of prey is about timing, waiting, being able to capture the bird in the right place in the frame, in position, in focus: and that bit of luck in getting the shot. So whilst luck is only part of the recipe, the only things – the research and the patience – don’t necessary stand alone as the qualification of being a photographer. So the notion of what ‘photography’ actually is comes really down to experience, the constant repetition of a set of skills and traits – and imagination.

The adrenalin: …a picture we set up for 5 hours.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

In a different photography genre, for example, in tableaux photography that is set up and contrived for camera, the images might bend more in the post-production, to gradually meet the artist’s full vision, at leisure – like a painting. But for every photograph in existence, the sum total of its subject(s), its setting, mood, story are not all down to the photographer’s doing. Nothing really belongs to the photographer or is unique to them, or completely under their control. The person photographed by a street photographer for example, is their own self, styled themselves, choosing their pose of their own accord, within their setting. In fashion photography, there is creative input from stylists, from assistants; the models’ poses from a familiar cultural dictionary of body language copied from images seen before, with the photographer shooting them also with a multitude of iconography in their mind that they have ever visually experienced.

Contemplation: made with a butterfly shot in the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle. I nearly didn’t go to the museum, as I wanted to take a nap instead. So many of my images from this shoot would otherwise have been a different story.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

Then there are all the unexpected things that happen during a shoot (any type of shoot) that the photographer will recount: when the burst of natural light came, or the model pulled a brilliant expression, a person accidentally entered the frame, and all the bits and pieces that fell into place that went toward the making of one picture. I could think of one unexpected quality for every one of my images. Everyone should be able to think of several random – strong or subtle – inspirations or references that goes into every one of their images. Even though a lot of my work is self-portraiture, featuring myself as the model whom I myself ‘style’, I felt even more than usual a force in action that would power my ‘flukes’ – if anything, I had to rely on flukes more.

Of course, it is the eye and skill of the person capturing and creating that makes the ‘photographer’. Whether the photograph is of a scene that had no interception from the hand of the photographer, or a set-up completely designed by them or another designer, it is the act of observation, angle and timing. It is the chemical reaction, between the subject and the camera, that constitutes the photographer’s mark. Even the photographer training on a workshop shooting a ready-made set-up has the opportunity to be creative. In the time they are given to direct, there emerges a window in which can be identified, even in its barest slither in a context otherwise devised by someone else, the creative input by that photographer.

One good picture does not make a ‘photographer’. All those things we associate with a good photographer: skill, or talent, or eye, can’t be faithfully conveyed in one single picture. It can give an overview, but not a conviction. Being a photographer is about capturing and creating images again, and again, and again; the ongoing functionality of production – both as a ‘photographer’ and as an ‘artist’. The persistence, the repetition, the accumulation of lots of those ‘flukes’ is the photographer’s real accolade. The measure is in their repeated persistence of making images happen: whether they are a wildlife, fashion, art photographer. It is someone who constantly instigates situations to shoot in.

The escape: The images for this were shot reluctantly on large JPEG when we ran out of memory card space after rowing out from our cabin to the other side of the lake.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

And this is why I’ve always sensed something I didn’t quite like about photography competitions. The idea of being judged for one photograph actually means very little. Of course, some competitions invite small series of images for submission – but generally, it is one concept, epitomised by one image, that they are seeking. And it makes sense – after all, the judges are looking for as straightforward a task as possible, having to sift through possibly thousands of entries.

In rewarding one picture, we are congratulating a photographer on merely one ‘fluke’ they have experienced, on one single effort they may have exerted to produce one image, that is questionable as to how much input was given from other people, and that in itself gives no indication as to whether the person really should be congratulated, esteemed, and rewarded as a ‘photographer’.

Her fleeting imprint: Shot in a heavily-guarded abandoned mental asylum we managed to get into during its last few weeks before being demolished.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

Humans want it easy. Humans want to simplify. Humans want to compare one thing with another one thing, and make a conclusion about which is better. So in photo competitions, it makes sense that we want to look at one picture, react to one picture, and congratulate that photographer often on the basis of a pigeonhole into which we have placed them. We don’t want to have to look at a person’s numerous bodies of work, to understand their ever-evolving desires, to understand their mind and their intentions – even if we did that, the unique make-up that we discover in each person’s lifetime of work would become too mind-boggling to be able to sit it beside someone else’s work and state who should win a prize.

Storm Door: Shooting this without any idea I would add ships, I was going to close the door, but casually dismissed it.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

I am not saying photography competitions are bad or should not exist, or that I have never entered one, or will never enter one again. They can be very valuable experiences on which to hinge and market ourselves, and it is precisely that: being aware of their over-simplification and what they really are about. First, your work must stand a chance of randomly catching the attention of the judge within that one split second when they first flick through all of the entries, and if for whatever arbitrary reason your image does not connect with them in that time, place and split second, your submission was futile. On the other extreme, even if your picture goes on to win the competition, it is not your picture, not the way you contextualised it as part of your series or your body of work – it’s a picture that has been re-appropriated by the judge in their specific time, place and taste – it becomes theirs, it’s their choice of representation of the competition. What/who they pick will always be on their terms. And though the rewards (prizes, awards, exposure) may be great – and worth shunning all of this philosophical drivel I’ve written – deep down, the winning of a competition doesn’t prove anything about your photography, your abilities, the profundity of your work as a whole. It only proves that people enjoy that one ‘fluke’ you orchestrated, and decided to give you something in return, and to accept you into their circle, at least temporarily.

I speak particularly of those competitions that do not ask for anything specific, opening up a whole range of categories for submission, where the criteria is even more blurred. I have opened up photography magazines where a spread of readers’ pictures are displayed, everything from penguins to naked ladies, and wondered what I’m supposed to think as I look from one isolated diverse picture to the next.

Handbreak: The cars and tyre tracks in the Dubai desert were not ideal on first glance, but then became part of a Gulliver-esque narrative.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

I think photography becomes a lot more interesting and meaningful when we actually take the time to appreciate an artist’s wider body of work and read about their background and their process, how they manage the unexpected alongside the orchestrated, how they go on to make another picture, another and another (which is exactly why I enjoy Camera Obscura, for the time it devotes to every artist’s piece – and the diversity with which different artists talk about their work). What makes an artist/photographer is their continued strain of creations, the gaps between their pictures as well as the pictures themselves, and their refusal to accept the non-existence of originality by restlessly remixing their inspirations in their own way.

Parasite: Originating from an outtake of me stooping over in a field, along with an outtake of the wood.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

For more photos please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website and her facebook page.

Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard

Gonzalo Bénard — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 17:26:20 +0000

Oneness — Uncaged Nature, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

Text and photos by Gonzalo Bénard.

Not even for one moment did I have a conscious break asking, “What am I doing here, naked among the sheep, trying to create a dialogue with these piles of wool when the only thing they know is how to bleat?”

Oneness — Chicken Head, 2009
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

I’m one of those people who have so called ‘difficult mornings’. A period of time between ‘waking up’ and ‘being awakened’. A period of time when the conscious remains inactive, so not filtered. It is in this period of time when we create, when everything flows through our subconscious as if it were free.

A few years ago I woke up from a coma which made my brain run out of oxygen. I was living in Barcelona at the time, right in the centre of the city, in a building much like any other. Surrounded by concrete. Concrete people. And windows looking on to more concrete.

Oneness — Conversations as a Bird, 2012
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

Previously I lived and studied in Yolmo, in the Himalayas, with Tibetan monks in a monastic school of arts, dance and philosophy. This was many years ago. Maybe 15. I lost my chronological memory during my coma, and never worked at recovering it as I never found it necessary to live. Time just doesn’t exist. There is the past supporting the present to help build the future. And all of these, the whole life itself, is a collection of moments. Moments with no time. Making a single major moment called life.

Oneness — Deep Wooded, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

In the same area where I spent summer holidays when I was a kid, and teenager, there was an immense field where I used to run free. Most times naked. Sometimes painting my body and playing Indians with my brother’s presence, after he died. It was the way I had to make him feel closer. We used to collect pieces of wood and sculpt them creating rituals of life, and rites of death. We used to perform ceremonials in nature, to nature. Acting like wolves. Birds. Trees. Wind. Feeling the elements. Earth. Fire. Water. Air. The air we could feel on our naked bodies. The cold waters of the river near by. The heat of the sun. On earth. Sometimes we used to steal a horse to ride free. As if the owner wouldn’t know that.

Oneness — feather, 2011
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

Since a kid I had this connection with the elements, and with death. It has always been part of me, growing up with this. Talking with dead people who come asking for help, when they left unfinished issues in their life here. I’m used to listening to the elements. To creating dialogues.

After some years living in Barcelona I started feeling a need again for this. For nature. For the basic elements as I couldn’t find them in the concrete. I then had a motorbike accident on the highway going to a place where I used to find it. I needed more than a moment. I needed that time to connect life. With life.

Oneness — Feathered, 2009
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

When I woke from the coma I took finally the decision to find a wooden house in the middle of a forest near the sea, far from everything so I could find myself again. Fix lost puzzle pieces. Find memories lost. Knowing that I could only be successful if I were being me in nature. After this first re-encounter with me and nature, sometimes dancing nude under the moonlight being touched by moon beams filtered by the trees of the forest, I moved to the country house for a sabbatical year, far away, closer to myself.

Oneness — Garden Me, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

There I found my brother again. In nature. Where I left him the last time, waiting for me to play again.

If before the coma I had had an intense and immense fight between the subconscious and conscious worlds, the whole sabbatical year in the country side was a battle to fix the whole me.

Oneness — Horned, 2009
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

I decided to stop.

To listen.

To feel.

To live.

Oneness — My Body Sheep, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

To create new boundaries so I could feel and understand them—so I could break them.

To feel nature and be a part of it; as a giant cactus can co-exist with a fragile flower.

To observe and learn how an eagle was building its nest in that tree, and how the kids were born there, and how they had the first lessons in flying free. And not falling down. Feeling the wind and going with it or through it.

Oneness — My Stoned Hand, 2008
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

To create dialogues. Within and without the fences.

And no, I didn’t give up for a single moment when I decided that I would have a deep dialogue with the sheep walking around there. I listened to them bleating as if they were teaching me how to do the same. And I answered till I achieved dialogue. Naked with them on my four legs. I was happy. I was feeling part of nature again. I felt one of them. I broke boundaries to be in oneness again.

Oneness — Self-fish, 2008
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

Then something happened as a welcome from nature; one of them gave birth next to me. So I helped the baby one to come out. I was giving life to life. Participating in Life. Living Life. Again.

I took the horses then, and ran wild and free. Feeling the winds and breezes, its breaths and heart beats. As oneness, or in oneness with the horse as if it were the horse taming me. The horse felt that I trusted her. And when you trust you receive the same back. When it’s honest and deep trust without questioning. Just being. I let the horse tame the man to become one with her. So she become one with me.

Oneness — The bird and the wolf, 2012
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

And the wood. The trees, the mud. The plants growing. The smell and all the senses renewed day after day. I started dancing again, dancing rituals of life. Dancing rites of death. Dancing stars and infinite skies. Feeling the mud underneath my bare foot. The air feeding the fire feeding the earth feeding the water feeding me. Dancing as air as water as earth as fire. Feeling the eagle’s wings, the wool’s warmth, the wolf’s heart, the horse’s power as a steady rock. Feeling myself in nature. As a wizard, a shaman, a boromatchi… a wise being feeling nature as it is. Without labels. Without boundaries. A hybrid of many lives.

Oneness — The Tamed Man and His Horse, 2010
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

With respect. In Oneness. Being honest. Being death. Being rebirth. Being alive. Being life.

Being love.

And Being One.

For more information and photos, please visit Gonzalo Bénard website or buy Oneness Blurb book.

Oneness — Voodoo Dance, 2009
© Gonzalo Bénard
Please visit Oneness, by Gonzalo Bénard for the full size image.

Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela

Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:52:39 +0000

Retreaded
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Text and photos by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

First I will describe how Ecology began (which was roughly in November 2010). For a while previous, I had wanted to bring environmental topics into my work, but did not know how to do so without feeling like I was forcing some undesirably didactic quality into my images. Instead, I waited until it felt right and instinctive. It began roughly at the time when I shot Free range (below). I was compelled to shoot in the atmospheric winter Kent landscape, along with a bin and some rubbish I’d brought along to anchor the desolate feel of an outdoor nude. Unusually, I also chose to openly display the brand name of the supermarket bag. Posing for my own picture, and not being able to see exactly what the pose looked like till afterwards, I was fascinated by the distortion of one of the shots in-camera. The strange hole in the curve of my neck and shoulder made the top of my body reminiscent of a hollow carcass. The final image I presented, along with the title I gave it, started to suggest a new, more topical level of dialogue than the fantasy realm evoked by a lot of my work up to then. The work to follow varied in tone, but overall it set the precedent for a new angle.

Free range
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

In continuing to act upon this new environmental inspiration, I listed some problematic aspects of our modern existence. For example, our overuse of plastic and packaging in general, imminent oil and water depletion, the littering of the landscape both on a personal and mass-industrial scale, the reliance of man on medicine and our drug-reliant medical system (the latter which has become my focal/‘favourite’ topic that I am always craving opportunities to express). Pictures like Midway by Chris Jordan spelled out the starkness of contamination of the planet and inspired me to want to present this kind of juxtaposition in my own portrait/nude tableaux.

I went on to casually gather unlikely props and materials, centred around waste, plastic, domestic objects and banal functional items. Some props were brought from home, such as rubbish, cling film or items of clothing. Some props I bought with purpose, such as an inflatable fish; others I found more haphazardly on my wanderings, such as traffic cones, decaying boats, an old broken television set. Gyre falls, below, was a pivotal image in my early days on this series where I started to see how nudity and waste could co-exist with an otherwise beautiful or graceful pose.

Gyre falls
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

It was a tricky early-morning shoot that I felt clumsy doing, but the plastic took on a silvery, water-like appearance and in its symbolism, literally moved along the current of the series’ direction. This picture became a personal ‘benchmark’ to look back on at times when I became doubtful that nudity combined with waste was not an overly ambitious coalition. The contrapuntal placement of fashion models amongst flies and pig heads in the images of my longstanding inspiration Guy Bourdin has inspired me to believe that sensuality or beauty can sit alongside bizarreness and surrealism.

Because of the nature of shooting nudes outdoors, a lot of images have come to be shot with varying levels of collaboration from my partner Matthew. Heatstroke is one of our favourites: one of the most ‘collaborative’. I had posed nude in the cool damp ferns wearing all but a faux-fur coat; and later Matthew had shot long exposures of the car taillights through the mist. The moment in post-production happened when I was literally about to close down the set of images and conclude I hadn’t anything fruitful (at least, the ‘thing’ that I was looking for at the time evaded me).

Heatstroke
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Suddenly, joining the long exposure with the picture of me posing, a forest catastrophe was born: a strange darkening scene that spelled the end… where humanity sits on ravaged land holding onto its last lavish possession. As for most of my images, I thought long and hard about the title: it had to encompass the ambiguity of the strip of ‘fire’, whilst also inferring something more personal or even sensual in the way the woman poses, stripped of everything but the fur, which has in turn been symbolically ‘stripped’ from an animal. The title comes to acknowledge the ephemeral and yet essential quality of natural human desire, whilst at the same time envisioning the synthetic chemical heat sent through the heart of nature by the activities of humankind.

iv/tv
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

IV-TV moves onto referencing technology, in a forest scene where the posing figure is foetal, as if being birthed from the smoking, toxic waste of the empty television set, or escaping from it. At the time of making this image I was also aware of a symbolic reference to our rituals of childbirth and the tethering of woman to machine in the standard Western approach. The picture and title became suggestive of many threads of thought that come from the binding of humanity with technology. In The divorce, below, I was also inferring a link to medicine although this is on a more connotative level. There is a ‘disconnection’ between mind and body, but it is subtly noticed, just as it is overlooked or unacknowledged by so many of us that live by the particular (symptom-led, rather than cause-led) health system Western medicine dictates as normal.

The divorce
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

An important aspect in my series is in welcoming ambiguity. There is not a definitive ‘it’ intended for everyone to ‘get’. The topical issues that inspire me are heartfelt and serious, but rather than submitting to some singular message that suggests how we should live, I started with a sense of futility of ‘doing anything’; the message was more about brooding, about inwardly reflecting, taking as much righteous ‘message’ from the image as you wish, in the manner of a private religion. Later however, I began to write words with my images to actively spur people into thinking about undesirable topics. Paltry, below, is an example of an image where I was inclined to comment on our tendency as a human race to ‘bury our heads in the sand’, and the body become a meat chop, a slab or a commodified object, rather than a living respiring instrument.

Paltry
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Throughout this series, I’ve experienced a desire to inject a little bit more preparation into my normal spontaneous approach, but still letting the ingredients come together organically whilst shooting (especially if I’m shooting myself, and can’t see and frame myself like I can with another model). In musing over ideas, I started trying to do some sketches, but found that I prefer to write down words. The selection and editing will then be another part of the journey and discovery. The titles I add to the images are a helpful way of both directing the viewer towards the meaning(s) I have in mind, but also remaining aloof (to acknowledge there is always more than one meaning) often with something mystical sounding, or words that could be a pun. Sometimes the idea for the title comes before the making of the image, as with While stocks last.

While stocks last
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Moored
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Above is Moored, shot in Dungeness, an inherently dystopian town on the coast of Kent. This is one of the few of the series so far that uses colour dramatically and vibrantly, but by way of juxtaposition with the morbid element. Otherwise, quite a few of my images in Ecology have become black and white pieces. There is something quieter and yet sometimes more powerful about black and white. There is something that often really suits the nude in the landscape, to be devoid of colour. I am clearly not alone in this thinking, as I am just one of many artists who have fallen into lust with the synergy between nude and monochrome. Somehow, by taking away the colour of a nude in nature, the connection to the banality of reality becomes severed. The image will sometimes remind me of analogue photography, as in Caesura and Denuded.

Caesura
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Denuded
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I have fond memories of shooting Denuded. Matthew and I had wandered Ashdown Forest and I was looking for a suitable fallen tree. We came across one that was half buried in the shrubbery and looked like an elephant’s trunk. I toppled backwards naked in the misty cool air, whilst we looked both ways for any hikers. It was as if time had stopped around us whilst we got the pictures done. It was Matthew who first suggested converting to black and white, and when I did so, I was compelled to keep it like that. The drama of the scene looked equally good in colour as in black and white: it is probably the only image yet that I display both in colour and in monochrome. Although the monochrome lacks the detail of the green moss and fern texture, the nude shape sits delicately, yet clearly outlined, like a faceless shored fish propped in a sea of leaves.

It is finished
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I use whatever I can find in the outdoor location to help make contrasts, concepts and shapes. It is finished, above, was shot with direct light from the sun that burst through the clouds for all but a moment (with help from Matthew, who concentrated on timing the light for the shots whilst I worked on pose). There is a palpable Biblical inspiration in the image and the title, as in the image below also, which was shot with another model in an apocalyptic-looking orchard. I like the idea of a curious dichotomy where Eden meets Gethsemane; the line is blurred between Eve and Jesus on the cross… the utopia of Genesis joins the dystopia of the book of Revelations.

Stay awake and watch
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Many of my images take on an organic surreal evolution post-shooting. My current favourite piece in Ecology would have to be The Fourth Soil, shot only this year (January 2012). It also takes on a Biblical allusion in the title, which references a parable. I posed for Matthew to shoot me standing at a distance amongst the trees with a 85mm f1.2 lens we were using for the first time. I was inspired to create black and white images but did not plan for surrealism. I never usually plan for surrealism, actually, because it has to feel ‘right’ to me, in front of my eyes, there has to be a magic that just arrives at the point of execution.

The Fourth Soil
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I was moving the figures around the forest scene afterwards on the computer and saw a synergy between the truncated thighs and the saplings. It was exciting to see, in particular, the way the trees ‘clicked’ with the bodies for the first, third and fourth figures. The other two were added to complete the line, and the composition took shape. The frame was left wide to keep in all of the texture and detail of the mystical forest scene, dwarfing the figures with its vastness. It was a picture quite like no other in my portfolio, and those moments I love as much as when I create images that ‘fit in.’ Another important aspect of a black and white image, for me, is that the image often becomes ‘illustrative’-looking. Whilst some of my favourite colour pieces may be reminiscent of (and inspired by) paintings, my black-and-white images are instead often like drawings. I find it reminiscent of illustrations in books from my childhood, particular in this case the illustrations I remember in books by C.S. Lewis. Even in the shots before the surreal stages, there was a quality to the scene that I loved for its intriguingly charcoal-like appearance.

Parasite, below, was forged from the same fire as The Fourth Soil, in that the shots were from the same shoot and place, a shot of the forest by itself, and one of me crouching in a field. As I transformed and toyed with the body, I liked the interesting resemblance it had to the anatomy of a flea when rotated stomach-down. It called to mind the interesting notion of ‘the human parasite’, and when I shared it online, I invited viewers to write their comments that I would select and add around the ‘flea’, in the manner of an anatomical chart.

Parasite
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

In some images I feel that the nudity beckons a more sexual dialogue than others. The dialogue can be seen to nudge away from the environmental, back to the personal, but in another respect, the sexual and environmental can be taken together as a combined theme. I felt this way when I made The invasion (below). Alongside this image, instead of writing something to direct the viewer’s interpretation, I listed an outflow of suggested readings:

“an optical illusion; the opening of an ants’ nest; a solar system of encroaching planets; a cluster of spacecraft; a rash of infection; a synthetic/disrupted sexuality, attacking the body; a self-destruction that has been planted within; a dystopian Nyotaimori (‘body sushi’); a surreal form of censorship.”

In doing so, I allowed my imagination to explore how the genitalia of the figure literally becomes the landscape on which a dystopian narrative takes place.

The invasion
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

To conclude, the Ecology series has involved ‘stripping’ down, that is: myself as the model, literally in frequent nudes; the colour of the image, often down to the tones of monochrome or sometimes just with low-key lighting. And also, focusing more on the simple mood and atmosphere of the shot, often keeping a shot as a simpler nude ‘study’ or appending surreal layers that come about naturally like the layers of an onion. In the process, it has built another direction: new ways to show my ever-present inspirations (from Bourdin to the Bible), new ways in which I interact with my audience, and a new conceptual dialogue and approach to what I write with the images. Corkscrew, below, is the most recent image I created to date as part of this series. Monochrome was a natural choice for the muted tones of the pavement on which it was shot, and the surrealism was a wild lovechild of (half-reluctant) curiosity, and intentional desire to inject a distorted eroticism into a series that so far has been toying with the boundaries between personal and environmental. It suggests an evolution of Ecology, or perhaps the dawning of a new series.

Corkscrew
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

My aim within the next year is to round up the most cohesive set of images from Ecology for exhibition and also for a dedicated hardback book. Still, I will continue on to see where Ecology takes me.

This is the third and last article of a series of three essays by Natalie Dybisz:

For more informations and photos, please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website.

Moult
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela

Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:14:00 +0000

Suspended
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Text and photos by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

I can still recall the excitement I felt when I first saw a ‘levitation’ image. It brought to mind Victorian trick photos of women’s bodies floating under the hands of black-clothed magicians, like case studies of psychoanalysis, Freudian symbols of female hysteria. I also thought of the magical worlds in children’s stories: The Neverending Story and Peter Pan, epitomised by images I admired like that of young photographer Chrissie White, where a girl hovers toward her bedroom window in a purplish night-time scene. It seemed like levitation was the most exciting thing you could make happen in a photograph, and all down to careful shooting and some fairly simple Photoshop compositing work afterwards.

Reverie
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

My own efforts began in 2008 in a hotel room with Reverie (above). From this I embarked on a series of images which culminated in The smothering (below), a self-portrait that has come to be my most popular both online and in physical exhibition, spread-eagled over the web and exhibited in multiple cities internationally. But it is this image that has in turn made me wonder critically about the whole ‘levitation’ concept itself. I’m almost glad that it’s nearly sold out as an edition print, because it comes to resemble a period in my photography, and angle to my work, that I’m somewhat inclined to airbrush away just like the hands around my ankles in Photoshop. Why is that?

The smothering
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Most people who view this picture ask ‘how’. Almost everyone who sees it asks how I made it. They may even open up a conversation, not with ‘how do you do’, but with ‘how did you do it?’ It hung at Photo LA where even the art buyers queried the process. The interest was based solely on its technique. To me, the ‘how’ in art is only interesting if I also hear the ‘why’; the two are inextricably linked and make the story behind any image. Technique by itself is the domain of photography ‘how to’ magazines, the Blue Peter-esque ‘here’s one I made earlier’ where the viewers are shown how to copy something, step by step, stroke for stroke, without thinking, without feeling; just doing, for the sake of it, like making papier-mâché Easter eggs.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I am fully aware of my role in promulgating the popularity of levitation, by my writing and presenting about the mechanics of its production. Of course, I am not the ‘pioneer’ of that or of any technique; I was in turn inspired by other sources and then participated in co-inspiring a new wave of others to ‘levitate’. I’ve presented on it at tradeshows, festivals and in talks, written about it in magazines and in my two books that grace bookstores worldwide, and done workshops specifically about levitation imagery on both sides of the Atlantic. I have chosen to do each of these things, primarily because I don’t think there is any ‘secret’ about the production: by showing the technique, I hoped I could demonstrate that it is all but a technique, to be used within a wider artistic process. Note the important difference between inspiration and imitation: the ‘inspiration’ artistry talks of should be that which is manifested by a feeling, not the urge to emulate an exact image or notion of the singular ‘idea’. And it’s the latter that inevitably occurs with levitation, which in its nature of eye-shocking immediacy, becomes all about the visual: a domain of DIY for anyone to try, and it’s the hyped herd’s tight focus on the mechanics alone that is unsettling. I can’t help but feel a knot in my stomach when I see a tutorial break down the ‘step by step’ on levitation, with my images cropped in on the action, straight down to the nitty gritty, like the ‘money shot’ in porn.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

The crux here is to highlight a nagging feeling I have about the nature of levitation images. When I went through my initial tricks phase (in 2008) I felt as if I could not make a picture unless it had levitation in it. Fair enough, all artists go through phases. It is utterly natural and an artist’s attraction to something is their instinctive way to create. I liked the fact that a series of trick images was forming under my eyes, all with floating, falling or hanging women; a tapestry of elevation that for me was personally inspired by the symptoms of anxiety and a sense of unease.

Sprung and The jitters
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

But in these photo-sharing times, where anyone can make a picture and then share it with the world (something I have to be thankful for in my own career), so has the technique of levitation flourished. The dominos started to fall: someone would see someone’s image and ape it, then someone would see their image and ape that; endlessly creditless like a gushing river intermingling water from unidentifiable sources: the trend heightened, and the levitation photos came. My images formed a trickle dropped from one source pool, in turn falling into another, helping move the flow of a popular but superficial technique.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

A tsunami of levitation came forth: a world of people laying across invisible tables and implied chairs, veiled by motion-blurred hair, peeping out from underneath textures, toppled backwards fossilised, reaching towards objects shot in another time and place; pictures that range from ‘jumping mid-air’ to a complete collage of electronically-sewn limbs. Compared to when I first saw a levitation photo, like any new thing I had not seen before such as HDR photography, I gaze at levitation like an adult might gaze blankly at porn, wondering back to how the novelty of such a sight would first enthral them. Whilst modern digital photography and the internet has opened up so many people’s expression of creativity, a side effect is that we end up seeing so much of something, its wears thin. The internet becomes a public pinboard of so many ‘magical’ pictures that the democracy by which the technique became proliferated dissipates the magic itself. I examine the proficiency of the Photoshop handiwork like a miserable mistress in a tapestry class instead of feeling fascinated that such a surreal vision can be achieved with photographs at all.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I think back to my levitation phase, when I could think of nothing else but levitating, and almost sigh with relief that it’s passed. After all, once you do a levitation photo, after you make a subject float, after you apply the most seemingly astonishing thing you could put in a photograph, how on earth do you do a picture of someone, just sitting or standing, ever again? To be able to present any photo or series and ‘feel’ its power of communication, there has to be a conviction of its worth, and levitation jumps so high up the barometer it almost goes off the scale, like putting two spoons of sugar into your tea every day for a month and then trying to drink tea without it. By employing the richest, most hyperbolic, and fantastical vision, the notion of a normal photograph can become bland. Your photographic tastebuds can get burnt by that hot sweet tea, able to be satiated only by the strongest substance. And that is not to say there is anything inferior about fantasy, surrealism and magic realism; composited images continue to form my main vein of work. But levitation poured a substance so rich into my blood that it soon became hard to bear. The strongest surrealism employed for a portrait: that of human flight, leaves everything else crashing back down to earth with a resounding banality, diminishing appreciation for anything less than spectacular.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I personally find a lot of inspiration in paintings and illustrations, probably more than other photography. I am attracted to surrealism and pictorialism, and I have always embraced how heavily contrived works simply bear different values and production stories to more candid images. Whilst everyone has his or her own reason for wanting to make a levitation picture, I believe it is very difficult for levitation in particular to be done as part of a wider concept or message and not as an end in itself: it is too distracting. It is the message itself.

The adrenalin
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Whether the creator is aware or not, levitation is usually always instant gratification. The viewer doesn’t have to think when they look at it. In the way that modern media moves the mainstream to emotion over reason, we love levitation, because it doesn’t require much effort at all to enjoy the picture. No background dialogue, historical, political or otherwise is needed (part of what drew me to it), nothing necessarily poignant but the sweetest-stitched tableaux, the melodic notes of visual pop music. It is universal, communicating across culture and age, the obvious impossibility of defying gravity, which can be rendered by anyone with a camera and Photoshop: or even just a well-orchestrated jump. For the creator, things get tricky – so to speak – as life continues after the inevitably heightened response following their first ‘levitation’. The audience’s expectations of that creator become simplified. They want more of the same instant kick, that rich diet to which they’re becoming pleasantly adjusted. Anything other than levitation is a consolation prize. I have felt as though anything I did post-levitation phase was at risk of boring my online viewers, a hangover after a wild night out. They saw suggestions of levitation where there weren’t any, and they sometimes still do. I feel as though I have somehow truly ‘tricked’ them. Levitation left an odd aftertaste, a phantom presence in my work that I didn’t quite like.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I am a casualty of the levitation war with myself. I feel like I have had to re-teach myself appreciation of a photograph, a regular photograph. I had to soothe myself with the reminder that there are more purposes to photography than to instantly titillate, wow and melodramatise. That such thing as realism exists, and that finding surreal moments within the ‘real’ can often be more rewarding.
Of course, this is just about my own world, and my conflicts between desires for both manipulated and untouched pictures, a diversity that may not be so wide in the work of other people who have pleasantly levitated with less of a bump back to earth. Like an ex-alcoholic having the occasional tipple, I still sometimes create levitation-based imagery although they’re usually within a specific context. And in truth, I have seen photographers who have attended my levitation workshops go on to incorporate the technique successfully into commercial and fashion work. In my own personal work, I have wiped the palette clean and rebuilt new images upon it, introducing titbits of surrealism slowly back in, like a child’s rationed chocolates after teatime. That way I actually enjoy the pictorialist, surrealist treats more. It’s like stripping back your make-up routine so that it doesn’t take so long to wearily apply the make-up every day, and to not look so different with the make-up off at night. I can appreciate a photo again – and as ever, I love how it can develop into something else in Photoshop – but with subtleties, and new ‘tricks’, something that may even go unnoticed at first, or brew into a wild cocktail. Tricks that are enmeshed primarily in reality, some far more saccharine than others, and going back to the tea analogy, it’s fitting that I actually have no problem switching from sugary tea to sugarless tea in the same day.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I didn’t really think too much about the reader is supposed to take away from this article. It’s not rosey and pleasant and joyous. In a sense it’s the opposite, like pricking the balloons on the girl levitating above a cornfield and watching her tumble into a heap. One of the main challenges of looking at any photography is challenging oneself: to see things differently, to see it from another perspective. I seek a balanced diet in photography by trying to understand other people’s tastes – trying to view my own ‘taste’ objectively from time to time – and when I do happen across another person’s levitation photo, to see it through the vision of their own freshly excited eyes.

This is the first article of a series of three essays:

For more informations and photos, please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website.

The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous

Kalliope Amorphous — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:08:57 +0000

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

Text and photos by Kalliope Amorphous.

salivating thoughts on iron,
quickening their rust,
the last casts of a lantern,
write on the wind with dust

a cavalcade of letters,
an eraser made of words,
a ghost, a spectral face,
a nothingness that mutes
the originating space

transmuting vision to parchment,
which covers the eyes with its skin
and cages the heart as a tenant
in a house on the head of a pen

each testament a zombie,
each word a tribe of fleeting ghosts
I cannot paper nor pen their army
temporary implements
are most reluctant hosts
and I do not have the muscle
to wrestle bone from marrow
nor the compass for Euterpe’s angle
whose singing springs unfiltered
from the larynx of the sparrow.

(Excerpt from The Futility Of Words)

I am spellbound by that place which Artaud so perfectly described as “that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach”. My work focuses on the subconscious aspects of emotion and perception; the hidden reverie, the fleeting vision produced in dream; mute moments of despair, heartbreak, wonder or horror which are not expressed outwardly in our day to day lives, but remain a part of our inner worlds or end up pinned to the archetypes in fairytales and myths.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

Before I ever picked up a camera or stood in front of one, words were my primary canvas for painting these inner emotions or perceptions onto something tangible. As I have made my way from the written word to the still image, I have come to realize that the absence of words is a language of it’s own. I use myself as a “prop” for all of my images, which means that in addition to composing and capturing the story, I am physically immersed in it as well. I have come to embrace this process as a way of creating visual poetry.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

It has been said that the human face is capable of manifesting over 200,000 individual expressions, making it a canvas of myriad range for depicting the most dramatic to the most subtle of emotions. Through the slightest shifting of the eyes, the positioning of the lips or the flexing of the facial muscles, a new story is created. Further, there are the infinite possibilities of the body and it’s nuances; a gesture of the arm, the preening of the neck, the placement of the hands. As a photographer who also plays the role of model, I am driven by this seemingly infinite palette of possibilities for conveying the intangible aspects of emotion. Much like poetry, these images are personal renderings of inner landscapes, or of my perceptions of the potential inner landscapes of the characters that I create.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I enjoy blurring the lines between “self” and “other”. In the early stages of my work, I was very focused on character development and physical transformation. When I first began experimenting with self-portraiture, my focus was on attempting to create the most varied characters possible. I wanted to see how far and how drastically I could alter my own image, because I was not setting out to take autobiographical photographs. Those early photographs were very simple and theatrical. I rarely show them, but they represent the roots where this journey into conceptual self portraiture began.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

Having grown rather reclusive over the past handful of years, being the model, stylist and photographer became a natural progression. It was not something that I had planned, nor did I ever expect to be a “self portraitist”. I realize now that many elements of my life combined to bring me to this work. I had spent a lot of time in my youth in front of the camera as a model and it was there I realized that, from a photogenic perspective, my face has a very chameleon-like quality. Having a passion for makeup arts and theatrical styling, I am able to combine all of these elements in order to use myself as a prop for my photographs. I have always preferred working alone and I also come from a long line of artists with a history of keeping odd hours while creating. I half-jokingly blame my genes for my frequent 3 AM creative jolts, yet since I am the protagonist in all of my work, I am able to experiment with my ideas right away.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I turned the camera on myself not only because it happened to be a convenient evolution, but because I am drawn to this work as a practice in the deconstruction of identity; both self-identity and the perception of “other”. Through this work, I often end up empathizing with qualities and stories that I view as separate from myself. Yet, more often than not lately, I realize that I am sometimes a part of these stories on levels that are often entirely unconscious. My perspective is beginning to shift and it is becoming both horrifying and amazing in those moments when I realize that I have tried to tell a story and without my intending to, the story is my own on very subconscious and personal levels. With my Hypnagogia series for example, a lot of time went by before I realized and/or acknowledged that every one of those images is deeply personal in some way. This is not the case with all of my images, but I am allowing myself to recognize subconscious reflection in my work. I have experienced this sort of symbiosis in poetry before, but it never occurred to me that a still image could be capable of the same.

chewing the lips of twilight
with tongues of gold and azure,
candles strip their lungs of light
and tie them to a mirror

I no longer recognize a face
since they mistook the looking glass for skin
and all their ashen breaths erase
the space where eyes reflected in.

(Excerpt from Sentences)

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I had initially felt a very strong sense of vulnerability when my photographs were beginning to get published and exhibited. One of the stigmas attached to self-portraiture can be the idea of narcissism or vanity and in the beginning I struggled with the presentation of this work as self portraiture, because it is precisely the place of “stepping outside of the ego” that I work from. I had once considered not even referencing my images as self portraiture, but I had considered it far too long after my work became known. While trying to define my work socially and off-the-cuff without the images on-hand, I sometimes felt that the inquirer imagined that I spent my days photographing myself snapshot-style as “Kalliope” as they contemplated the size of my ego and/or delusional behavior. In retrospect, I laugh at those awkward attempts at explaining what I do and this is why “I am not a photographer or a narcissist. I am an artist with a camera.” is the first line of my artist statement.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I now embrace the act of creating self-portraiture and the word self-portrait. I realize that ultimately, these are personal and subjective expressions which are going to be viewed objectively once they are put out into the world. Like the objective lens in photography which gathers light to form something tangible, the most I can hope for as an artist is that my work may sometimes trigger an emotional response from the viewer or that they may be engaged by the story line. I often try to compose the scenes from the perspective of a voyeur in order to invite the eye on a journey through a keyhole, as if glimpsing a moment that perhaps should not be seen.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

I have been writing poetry since I was five years old. Frequently veering off into other art forms (mixed media, performance art, etc.), I have always returned to poetry as my main channel. I write often and I have a large volume of poetry completed over the past year which I am currently revising. I see many similarities in the written word and still image when it comes to the projection of one’s own subconscious. Often, the understanding of what or why I am writing or creating does not dawn on me until the project is finished or abandoned. There is an almost mystical element to it and I have talked to many other artists who experience the same thing. For example, I spent a year working on a volume of poetry which I thought was about one subject only to find out it is about something else entirely.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

When I was younger, I engaged in different writing styles and was very enthusiastic about sharing and publishing it. For awhile now, writing has become a more personal endeavor. For some reason, the sharing of my writing began to feel too vulnerable. I have described it as the feeling of cutting open ones own veins in the town square. I am someone who has had to make great efforts to put my work out for other eyes to see, I think this is because on one level I feel the frustrations of never being able to accurately convey what it is I want to convey. We have all of these modes of expressing the intangible through art, but I think that some of us who have this almost crippling passion at times, can become frustrated by the limitations of the art itself. This subject itself runs through of a lot of my poetry.

Silence
the heart does not speak of beats
time and tide sway and dictate
the whittling of a day
in blue advances and retreats;
some day, we will be free.
we are mirrors broken,
all and one,
throwing crooked veins of light
against the sun.
in my garden bower,
a heliotrope throws itself to the ground.
I cannot tell you the taste of this;
love is an animal that eats the tongue and never makes a sound.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

The irony is that I am metaphorically writing with my own skin in my self portraits, because many of the themes that I write on seem to get subconsciously filtered down into the photographs. These themes are often dark on the surface, perhaps easily misconstrued as nightmarish, sad or morbid. But, the place I am coming from is usually very optimistic. I have a constant, sometimes painful awareness of the brevity of life, the passing of time and the fragility of the human heart. I am almost always compelled, both in the shoot and in the post-processing, to create characters who have a sense of timelessness about them. Some of my imagery may appear dark, and some of it is indeed intended to be nightmarish, but the majority of my themes are pointing to our mortality and the fragile nature of being human. I want to visually explore all of the aspects of being human and the masks we wear; beauty and beast, angel and shadow side. I do not view these photographs as images of myself. To me, they are just portraits from this strange theater of life, emotion and time.

© Kalliope Amorphous
Please visit The Language Of Skin: Thoughts On Self Portraiture & Poetry, by Kalliope Amorphous for the full size image.

there is a space between the dream
where emptiness is sewn;
cold fossils drawn up by a seam
connecting earth and bone.

a ghost taps poems upon a rock
to bake their valleys in the heat;
small veins of milk, packed thick with chalk
casting white shadows on a sheet.

he mocks me by his flight.
time is heavy, flesh is rock,
blood is a lock built in the night
and set inside a clock.

from sanguine chambers banished,
a wrist draws a line of impasse
on the map of its own hand.

like this a life will languish:
a ghost inside an hourglass
suckling the bones of sand.

(Excerpt from The Sandglass)

Please visit Kalliope Amorphous website for more

© Kalliope Amorphous
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Exhibitions, by Alexadru Paul

Alexadru Paul — Fri, 20 May 2011 07:34:07 +0000

Text and photos by Alexandru Paul.

In 2003 I was tangled in thoughts concerning whether or not it was useless to take photos of whatever came my way as I had used to do. The feelings generated by an event and the act of photographing it, didn’t end up in my pictures. Or if something did end up, it was something else. The rectangle of the viewfinder had started to bother me. To limit my contact with the world. And then, somehow, photography moved from outside inside. I wasn’t looking for photographic subjects anymore, but for ideas that challenge photography.

It’s been a long time since I haven’t had a camera on me. And even if I push myself to take it with me, I soon forget about having it on me.

I started working at the Exhibitions project.

Some time after I graduated, I was trying to find myself a place as a fashion and advertising photographer. It seemed very stupid to me, at the time, the way myself and others were trying to fabricate a biography called CV – which only required mentions of success. Even the personal failures were featured as accomplishments. For example, if you ditched school after one year, you wrote that you studied for one year, not that you had been kicked out after the first year. The competition never cared about our weaknesses and failures. Our society doesn’t want to acknowledge our malfunctions and frailties. And if it does find out, we will be penalized. So we’re trapped making up this story, according to which you are to be cast in your rightful position by some headhunters. And since my CV never looked too good, I started wishing I would become a headhunter myself.

“…

Regardless of the length o life,
a resume is best kept short.

Concise, well chosen facts are de rigueur.
Landscapes are replaced by addresses,
shaky memories give way to unshakable dates.

Of all your loves, mention only the marriage;
of all your children, only those who were born.

Who knows you matters more than whom you know.
Trips, only if taken abroad.
Memberships in what, but without why.
Honors, but not how they were earned.

Write as if you’d never talked to yourself
and always kept yourself at arm’s length.

Pass over in silence your dogs, cats, birds,
dusty keepsakes, friends, and dreams.

Price, not worth,
and title, not what’s inside.
His shoe size, not where he’s off to,
that one you pass off as yourself.
In addition, a photograph with one ear showing.
What matters is its shape, not what it hears.
What is there to hear, anyway?
The clatter of paper shredders.”

Wistawa Szymborska – writing a resume

I asked several people to take a nude picture of themselves, keeping in mind that it will be publicly exposed. I set up a camera and a mirror near by that was positioned to show whatever the camera was seeing and a remote releaser. I asked them to look at themselves in the mirror until they were satisfied and then to release. It was as if they were making themselves a different kind of CV.

It was also a curiosity about the way people relate to their bodies. If they know it, if they use it for its capacities or just to show off.

I had planned from the beginning the way I wanted this to look in the end, like a big folder you can walk through. I stuck with the plan and I was wrong. As time passed by, I realized that people who came to take a picture of themselves, had mostly personal reasons for doing so. I found out some of these reasons, but I didn’t care about them at the time. Maybe this was the most important aspect of this project.

What I remember though, is their approach. Some took it like a cold shower. They would go in, close the door and in three minutes they would be dressed up and out the door. Some took a lot of time. I don’t know what they were doing. Others would get undressed and talk to me, ask me my opinion about them and about the purpose of the project, or would ask for my advice. And they seemed to enjoy somehow the magic of the studio, the warmth and the light.

A girl who asked me not to exhibit her photo, still wished to take a picture of her. She did request though, because she didn’t trust me, to take a picture of myself first. Then she changed her mind and said she didn’t want to take the picture anymore. I made a scene and swayed her to do it, after all. But I didn’t exhibit it.

It was a boy who took the most of time. About an hour? He came out puzzled. He told me it was very difficult to realize what you wanted others to see in you. When I developed the film, I saw that he completely misunderstood the requirements and took the picture with his clothes on.

Communism and orthodoxy are very strict about nudity. The elder half of people in my country believes nudity is indecent and taught their children consequently. To take a nude picture of yourself, knowing it will be publicly exhibited, is an act of courage. And while you are brave, you need the support of those around you. You expose yourself and become more receptive to everything that happens around you. And maybe this is the reason why the short time I spent with these people was intense and the connection we made, durable in time.

While I was working at this project, my daughter Sasa was born and I started to achieve a certain success as a photographer. I abandoned the nude project. And then I resumed it when Dan Popescu, my gallerist – started to show interest about it. Another friend, who meanwhile got rich, offered to pay for the exhibition. As it was expensive, I wouldn’t have made it without a sponsor, and since I didn’t plan on selling anything, it seemed fair not to make it with my own money. The friend-sponsor failed to pay the money he promised, so in the end I paid for it myself.

The installation was exhibited for one month at H’art Gallery in Bucharest, and it remained for three years in their deposit. During the crisis, the gallery moved and the new location proved too small to accommodate this installation. So it was donated to the National Museum of Contemporary Arts.

Please visit Alexandru Paul for more informations and photographs.

Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore

Sarah Katherine Moore — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 05:04:54 +0000

Text and photographs by Sarah Moore.

How can I talk about loneliness? After all, there are thousands of different types of loneliness. There are thousands more ways to experience it, describe it, or deal with it. Loneliness and its synonyms are so vague, so personal, and so elusive that it seems nearly impossible to address them.

So how do I talk about my experience with loneliness? This has been a question for me perhaps all my life. In fact, loneliness was so integrated in my life for so long that I didn’t even notice it. Yet, after moving from my home state of South Dakota to Rhode Island, where I attended school, this loneliness suddenly felt different. It felt more pronounced, more painful. How could I talk about this new loneliness through my art? How could I even begin to think about it, let alone picture it and share it?

I have written this as a statement of my work titled expanse:

“Throughout the years, I have become increasingly interested in my home of South Dakota and how the people and place shaped me and continue to influence me.

Even though I appreciate many aspects of the Midwest, it represents the pinnacle of the loneliness in my life. When I return, I inevitably regress to feelings of isolation, something I tried to escape my entire life.

My photography depicts the aspects of South Dakota that represent this loneliness for me. The landscape is beautiful but empty, simple but overwhelming. My relationships are based on love, but also thwarted by distance.

Expanses can be comforting but also stifling. Distance can fuel love but also misunderstanding. The vast space of the Midwestern land is something I can’t quite embrace, break free from, or understand, but it provides infinite inspiration for me.”

This statement makes so much sense to me, but I also barely understand it at all. Why does South Dakota provide such inspiration for me? This is the place that saddened me most, that I couldn’t wait to escape from, and that I dread returning to. Yet, with this sadness and dread comes inevitable longing and inspiration. I’ve relentlessly tried to figure this paradox out.

I’ve realized that if anything can describe the ungraspable emotions I feel towards my home, my past, and my family, it’s the land of South Dakota. This land not only provides inspiration for me, but it provides answers and explanations. Perhaps more than anything else I do or say, my photographs from home provide insight into my feelings, and perhaps into those of many others.

“Tell them there was a cow. It was in the field, near where you held the fence. Tell them the cow stood there all day, chewing at something it had swallowed long ago, and looking at you. Tell them how the cow’s face had no expression on it. How it stood there all day, looking at you with a big face that had no expression.”

David Foster Wallace

Anterior Future photograph. For a long time, I thought I could communicate emotional truths through documentary approaches. My focus was around the house. I believed the distance and loneliness I felt could be blamed on and represented by mundane interactions with my family. The truth was there was an intolerable disconnect between my family and myself when I was home, but the “truth” that my documentary photographs showed wasn’t this disconnect. A lot was going wrong when I decided to photograph at home. My ideas were clouded by strong emotions, and I didn’t have any sort of real focus. I tried to document, I tried to set up, I tried to abstract; I tried everything. Very little was working.

After a lot of floundering, thinking, writing, and questioning, I had a photographic breakthrough of sorts in October of 2008. I went home for about five days, prepared to make enough images to get me through until I could return in December. I knew documenting wasn’t working, and I knew that my landscapes were becoming more metaphoric to my feelings of loneliness. Armed with these preconceptions, I photographed at home much differently.

Some of my most successful photographs came from this trip to South Dakota. A lot of them were too intuitive to be completely purposeful. I continued taking self-portraits and some documents, but I spent most of my time out in the landscape. I photographed myself in the land and my mom in the land. I finally started to use the expanse of South Dakota’s terrain to represent the stifling emotions I felt at home.

There are a few crucial elements and ideas to my project expanse. Most I realized after the photographs came together; some I realized before I even started photographing. Self-portraiture, the landscape, diptychs and triptychs, repetition, and a certain color pallet are all important aspects of my work.

I now realize that self-portraiture has been important to me for a long time. I have made dozens of self-portraits in the past year and a half. Photographing myself is at once easy, as I’m a model I always have access to, but it’s also much more complex. I thought for a long time that the distance and loneliness found in South Dakota was simple. People grow apart and relationships become strained and what was once close becomes distant.

The distance between my family members and myself is different. It’s a result of physical distance, but it’s also a result of built-up emotional restraint. It’s a result of divorce, secrecy, betrayal, lies, anger, pain, and sadness. It’s a result of a complex home life floating in an overwhelmingly empty and stifling landscape. If I can photograph myself in this land, with some of these people, then I can start to show the other layers.

The self-portraiture in my work is a way for me to show some of these layers in a direct, confrontational, and controlled way. There are seven self-portraits in this series so far. The first and the last were taken about nine months apart. There are four images of me alone, two of my mom and myself, and one of my older sister and myself. These portraits allow me to show the loneliness I personally feel, and they also allow me to show the distance between my family and myself. Seeing the same person in multiple images portrays loneliness over distance and over time.

From the beginning, the landscape has been crucial to my work. At first, I simply took landscapes because I found joy in them. The Midwestern land is something I will probably never grow tired of photographing. The complete flatness of the land is so beautiful, and also so complex. Wherever you turn, you run into what appears to be the same view: expanses of fields, lone roads, and huge skies. With such sameness, the subtleties become incredibly important. Much like photographing the same person over and over again, photographing the land of South Dakota is a lesson in observation and acknowledgement of small changes.

The landscapes also represent the ultimate metaphor for the emotional content of my work. Photographing the land provided a respite from a complex home life. At the same time, the landscape of the Midwest can be incredibly depressing and lonely, which is exactly what it was for the first eighteen years of my life. The land on its own can be whatever the viewer wants it to be–daunting, relaxing, depressing, hopeful, boring, inspirational. When there are people in the land, it can exaggerate distance, discomfort, loneliness, awkwardness, and emotional claustrophobia. Expanses can indeed be stifling.

My use of diptychs and triptychs came from a need to heighten the overwhelming land of South Dakota. A single image couldn’t show the ubiquitous flatness, so I started creating panoramas that emphasized this. Horizon lines are an important visual and conceptual aspect to my work, and expanding these lines allowed viewers to better understand my ideas.

The multi-paneled images have become much than just an aesthetic choice. Piecing together two or three photographs allowed me to break up both people and land. I could guide my viewer through an image by using focus and lines in diptychs and triptychs. I could put my mom in the middle of a three-panel photograph to emphasize her aloneness next to the vastness of the land. I could break apart my own head in a diptych to at once push myself to the edges of a single frame and also join them to create a seemingly whole portrait. I could put different figures in different panels to exaggerate physical distance. And, of course, I could break up my horizon lines to address the confusion of this landscape and debunk the idea that it is easy to understand.

I used repetition a lot in this project. It’s hard not to repeat a landscape that is actually so similar everywhere you turn, and it’s hard not to repeat when self-portraiture was used so often. Facial expressions, poses, lighting, seasons, and sequencing kept this repetition from becoming boring. The same people and same landscape kept this repetition working conceptually. My loneliness in South Dakota didn’t just occur once or twice, but every time I went home. It also doesn’t just occur when I go home, but other is instead an integrated part of my personality, for better or worse. I wanted to portray the Midwest as I felt it, and I as I continue to feel some other places. Sometimes hitting the same note over and over again can be a wondrous form of poetry.

The color pallet of my project is composed of many browns, beiges, and grays. I used the occasional bright color, in a scarf or road perhaps, to break up the monotonous color scheme. Subtle colors shifts in the land and sky were the most captivating to me: when the light changed just barely from blue to gray to red, and when the ground swayed from dark to light brown within one plain. As long as I could control my lighting and color choices, I could better dictate how the photographs would be read.

“When do you know when something is becoming something that changes you?”

Daniel Handler

Throughout the course of this project, I have learned a lot about my personal loneliness and distance. I haven’t answered a lot of questions, but I’ve been capable of at least asking them. The vague concept of loneliness, the universal idea of home, and the personal ideals of land have come closer to being within my grasp.

I still don’t know what these photographs say to or about my family. The project evolved from a personal place to an even more personal one. I know what I see when I look at these photographs, and I know what a select few friends, teachers, and peers see, but I’m not sure what the universal statement is. Yet, I’ve always liked my work to be slightly ambiguous, slightly hard to hold onto. I tend to not like the obvious; I’m not an obvious person. All along, I’ve just hoped that if I produce images that really mean something to me, then perhaps they’ll mean something to others.

I said before that I could photograph the Midwestern landscape forever. I know this is true, but I’m also not sure if it will always have something important to say to me. This project hasn’t come to an end yet; if anything, I’ve just begun. I don’t know how long I’ll continue using my family and my homeland to talk about my personal ideas. I’ve learned that I can address things best through the land, but this doesn’t have to be a particular space. Expanses will always be important to me, but I know I can find them everywhere and through almost everyone. I hope to continue to tie emotions to the outer world, whatever and wherever they may be.

Camila, by Veronika Marquez

Veronika Marquez — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 06:29:03 +0000

Text and photographs by Veronika Marquez.

One day while I was assisting the master of photographic reportage class, we were looking at a work that dealt with prostitution. Everybody was talking about the quality of the work, about how good the photographs were and what an adventure it must have been for the photographer to have been there.

I went through such an experience more than once. When I looked at those photographs the only thing I felt was anger, distress and impotence because those photographs were a lie for me, part of a reality captured through the eyes of a photographer who surely believed he was very good for just having been able to be there.

I understand that there are stories that deserve to be reported, however, this does not only happen in the lives of prostitutes; we are not all victims and not all of us were mistreated.

I knew this world, I spent several years in it, got to know about 400 girls and more than 20 places with different characteristics but I never came across somebody with the characteristics shown in these photographs.

Why always choosing the same face, why all prostitutes have to appear as wretched, why always show them as poor, why always this sensationalism to put these girls in situations of misfortune?

I could assure that these photographs are far cry away from what I experienced.

This was one reason that made me move away from the photographic reportage. I thought: the day that I would have to take photographs, let’s say of “gypsies”, I would go to live with them, eat with them and even have some gypsy friends, however, in my photographs only my view of them would be reflected, their reality passed through my filter with already preconceived social ideas. Certainly, a gypsy who would look at my work would not find himself reflected in it.

All this made me feel powerless because I realised how little we are able to know about others and how arrogant we are to think that we see everything.

In my capacity as a photographer that I am now, I knew that I had a story to tell. I knew that I could speak better of something that I really had lived through myself and that it would be better than just to intrude into the life of someone else with a view from outside.

Time passed and I continued making similar works avoiding thinking about it. However, there came a moment when I was confronted again with this issue and with more force. As a photographer I had to tell it.

My life was already “normal”, the past far behind me, when I started to brood a lot about the decision of changing my life again and of abandoning the supposed tranquillity that I had achieved. The challenge was to start to explore avenues whose ends escaped from my ultimate control. I was afraid of being rejected by the people close to me but I was aware that if they would really like me, they would accept me how I am, with my past and present, and that if persons would be left behind on my way, it was because it was meant to be like that.

This was how the decision was taken. I had to speak about it. There was no way back.

I knew, in principle, how to tell the story and wanted to avoid falling into a cliché.

It took me along time before starting to take my first photographs.

I spent one year thinking about how to tell it: I recurred to images of the past, was faced with many questions, relived my story from the very beginnings when I was 16 years old, and asked myself why I had done it.

There were many things to be told, I visited many places of which each had its own set of rules, and this is the strongest weapon for walking with security through these worlds. I had made the acquaintance of so many girls with their stories, and many men, and through them their women and children. It was impossible for me to show all of it in the photographs. I could have written a book but to make photographs proved to be more difficult than I had thought.

I still had access to places that I used to frequent, I could have used them, I could have included some sex or resorted to some strong images. In principle, this would have been the easiest thing to do, however, it would have meant, for my taste, to fall into vulgarity. I looked for something different for my work.

I spent hours thinking, reliving everything. Months had passed and “Camila”, my old nom de guerre, resurged from the past. Now she was there, past and present together.

So I started with some test photographs. I already had a clear conception: the two of us would be together. I realised this in my photographs.

I continued the dialogue with my other character, talking to her, talking to myself I realised that almost everything that I am know I learnt from that former life. Walking through dangerous worlds is like walking through the jungle without so many masks; everything is more humane, revealing the true nature of our existence. Camila had to learn as she went along how to deal with all sorts of people, with danger and adventure. Every day she learned through the contact with people how to resolve negative situations, and I preserved what was good for her.

Now we were two in the photographs and both of us were very much alive. Being there together the two of us as if we were friends – and we were friends – today, at my place, in Madrid or in Montevideo, made it feel as if all this time had served to find and to accept us.

I search for the framing, use a 50 mm lens to avoid deformations and mount the camera on a tripod. I measure the light where I imagine my girls would be. I had previously made performance photography, and had used in my photographs self-performance and self-portrait. So I placed myself as the person that I am today, Verónica, and then as Camila. Same scene, same person, with past and present, I combine them with Photoshop in order to obtain the final idea.

The first photograph I took was at Christmas.

The plant visible on the photograph can be seen a lot in Spain during this season. It was taken just a few days ago since I received it as a present. The photograph is simple: Camila and I are there at my place in Madrid, talking about our matters while I look after the plant.

There we are. Camila tells Vero things, most likely how she spent the last night and whom she met. Vero prepares a mate for them so that they can start a new day together.

I am aware that my photographs are subtle: a simple glance will not do. Nobody could know that this is self-portrait photography, that we are the same person. I use the same resource as in the press: the text modifies the look on the photograph.

This is also true for Camila. It is necessary to read this bottom of the page, to read this text in order to understand what the photographs are about.

The colours are bright, subtle, even a bit saturated. Everything is clean, in all photographs there is light because I want to pull Camila, this prostitute girl, out of the darkness.

Every photograph has its shadow, its space. Both girls are present in my photographs, and those who look at them cannot deny it.

I end my work with a video.

The technique used is the same as for the photographs: a tripod-mounted camera and off the action goes. I took different scenes, which I edited with a video-editing programme later.

I thought of it as being dance choreography. There was a script with actions that repeated themselves with their own times and rhythms.

I must admit that my original idea had been different. I do not remember how it was but I know that the idea of two screens did not exist. What came last was the script with the actions to be performed as if they were a choreography: putting on the makeup, arranging my hair and putting on the wig. The sequence consisted in dressing myself as Camila and undressing myself as Verónica.

I took the takes and returned with the material home. When seeing all the scenes separately, almost without thinking about it, the video was finished. I arrived with the material I had to the final composition almost by way of magic.

With Santoral del Sábado, a poem by the Mexican writer Jaime Sabines, I pay tribute to my old profession.

I read the poem of this video some time ago in Montse’s blog, a girl form Barcelona, who is still working as a prostitute, and fell in love with it.

I learned the poem by heart, rehearsed it as if it were a theatre monologue, and the body started to find a away of accompanying it. Tripod-mounted camera, two spotlights and off the filming went.

At present, when I show my work, people usually thing that I have realised my full potential as photographer. I honestly believe that the work of a photographer, as many other professions, can at times become degrading if we have to make the impossible to sell our photographs, when we are paid so little without taking into account the involved work. Instead, I should shout with Camila from the rooftops that I have never felt humiliated, unworthy or unfree in my previous profession. Quite the opposite, I was free of moral and aesthetic prejudice, free to spend my free time as I wanted.

Today, I am the same person with a new set of rules who acts in the same way as back then.

Please visit Veronika Marquez for more photographs.

Pinhole Self-Portraits, by Alyson Belcher

Alyson Belcher — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 08:27:57 +0000

Following text and photos by Alyson Belcher.

For the past 10 years I have been making self-portraits that combine pinhole photography and improvisational performance. When I began this series, I was looking for a way to photograph the human body that went beyond an objective rendering of the external form. The body is a vessel that contains and channels all of our experiences, thoughts and feelings. My photographic process (the use of movement and long exposure times) has allowed me to access and give visual form to what lies beneath the surface of the skin.

During the early part of my life, athletic activities were my primary focus. I was a competitive springboard diver from the age of 6 until about 25. My family has been very involved in dance as well, so I have always been surrounded by people who are interested in movement. I was never a dancer, but I have been strongly influenced by all kinds of dance. I began to seriously take photographs when I was a teenager, and since I was always at the pool, I photographed other divers. At first, I was interested in capturing the strength and grace of the body in flight. Over the years, I realized that I was trying to convey something more subjective: the experience of diving, of being in that body flying through the air. This is what eventually led me into the studio to make self-portraits. I didn’t think I could actually make photographs that conveyed what it felt like to dive. But I might be able to convey the experience of simply being present in my body.

My first self-portraits were made in an empty studio using only natural light—nothing but me and my pinhole camera. I wanted to create an environment that was free of distractions: no props, no lights, nothing that would interfere with my experience while I was in front of the camera. This quiet, empty space was a place where I could focus inward and be fully present in each moment. I didn’t even use a timer; I counted out the seconds of each exposure. While my studio has become a bit more cluttered over the years, I still keep my shooting space very spare and empty. I use a 4 x 5 pinhole camera and Polaroid T-55 positive/negative film. I still use primarily natural light, but I sometimes have to add a little extra fill light on dark days. My exposure times range from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. And I still count the seconds rather than using a timer.

The Polaroid T-55 film has been a key element in this work. It is extremely helpful for me to see each image immediately after it’s made so that I can check composition and exposure. I have developed a system of working from one image to the next, of creating a storyboard for each day of shooting. I don’t usually have a clear idea of what I want to do when I enter the studio each day. I might have a glimpse of an idea, so that’s where I begin. It might be a gesture or a movement I want to explore, or it may be a feeling I want to convey. But wherever I begin, the work each day always unfolds in an unexpected and organic way. I make the first picture (which is often not very interesting) and I look for something that I like—it could be the way a certain movement leaves traces of the body on the film, or it could be a gesture. In the next picture, I begin with that element and build on it. And I continue that way for several hours, until I have a series of about 20 pictures that illustrate my process of unfolding and discovery for that day.

Making self-portraits with a pinhole camera is a relatively blind process. I am both the photographer and the subject. There is no viewfinder or ground glass in the camera through which I can preview the image. There are a lot of variables, but that’s what I love about working this way. I have drawn some lessons from my diving days that have allowed me to embrace the element of uncertainty. In diving you have to learn how to balance relaxation and control. You have to be relaxed enough to let your body do the dive, yet you also have to maintain control to execute the dive correctly. You have to totally trust your body and you have to have a keen sense of kinesthetic awareness—knowing where you are in time and space. These things have become key factors in the creation of my self-portraits. The pinhole camera has allowed me to incorporate the element of improvisational movement as a way of exploring both physical space and inner experience simultaneously. Combining the long exposure times with movement reduces my ability to predict how an image will turn out, and often I am pleasantly surprised. The image making process takes on a life of its own.

This work has benefited from my willingness to put myself in emotionally and physically challenging situations. I am drawn to things that challenge me, to things that put me off balance. Initially, there was a fear in exposing myself. Like most people, I am uncomfortable in front of the camera. When I began this work, I wanted to see what would happen if I allowed myself to fully experience that discomfort, how it might shift and change over time. I have also been known to create physical situations for myself that are very difficult, if not impossible, to hold for the entire two minute exposure time. As I count out the time and my body strains to hold a position, unexpected movements are recorded on the film. These images are some of my favorites, for they surprise me the most when I peel apart the film.

One of the themes that has emerged in my self-portraits is the relationship between stillness and movement. Where does a movement or a gesture originate internally? Is it possible to ever be completely still? I have attempted to remain completely still for an entire exposure, but it’s really not possible. Even if I am just standing in front of the camera, I’m breathing and my heart is beating. Those subtle movements are recorded in the image.

Another theme in my work is the presence of multiple figures in a single image. These figures contribute a narrative quality to the work. In some photographs I appear to be interacting with myself, or there appears to be another person in the frame. Some viewers think that there are several different people in these photographs, but the figures are all me. The presence of multiple figures can represent the duality of the self, or different parts of myself interacting with one another.

When I’m moving in front of the camera, I have to move very slowly in order for any image to show up on the film. I have to remain still for about 10 seconds if I want the film to record any trace of my body. If I want my body to leave a more solid impression on the film then I may have to remain still for 30-45 seconds. So in the images where there are multiple figures, I held each one of those positions for at least 30 seconds. The movement is a slow, moving meditation in which I remain acutely aware of my body and my position in front of the camera. I do not mark out my positioning ahead of time. Rather, I trust my instincts to tell me when, how, and where to move.

This series of pinhole self-portraits began as an experiment and it has evolved into an ongoing visual journal. The focus for me has always been more on the process than the product. If I focus too much on getting a “good picture”, nothing works. When I am able to let go of expectations and leave room for the unexpected, the results are filled with mystery and magic. The best photographs have been the result of spontaneity and improvisation.

A misleading moment, by Aaron Hobson

Aaron Hobson — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:03:22 +0000

I really like the panoramic format, and I think it is a shame that usually it is used only for classic landscape, most of the pictures out there have the 1:1 or 2:3 format. It is the same for music, i love the 20′ tracks of the 70’s, and I don’t understand why today it seems that a song can be only 3′ long. The photos by Aaron Hobson are a nice example of the possibilities offered by the panoramic format. Furthermore he always plays the character represented in the picture, thus his photos are an interesting mix of staged photography, with a clear and intense cinematographic look, and self-portraits.

Following text and images by Aaron Hobson.

I would like to tell the background story behind one of my photographs, “a decisive moment”, that might be surprising for those familiar with my work and this particular image. The majority of my images are intentionally “dark” and tend to be misleading, which is not a hard feat to accomplish in a society where violence can be seen anywhere you look if you try. Whether it’s at the arcades, the movies, or on Television, violence is a major part of our society. So much so that I might go so far as to say it has softened our view of violence. It’s almost trendy to add violence to a music video and how many more TV shows do we need about Ganglands, Police chases, and so on and so forth?

A little background about me. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on it’s Northside. My father was a commercial photographer that shot for Kodak, Xerox and other fortune 500 companies in Rochester, NY before moving myself and my brother to Pittsburgh. For a while his studio was at the Mattress Factory before it became a world renowned museum. I used to run around the light installations of James Turrell and visit Joseph Fiedler‘s studio to see his newest paintings. Outside of the studio I hung out with the other children in the neighborhood (see photo of me with pookie and ray-ray from 1985). There were definitely times where myself or my friends got into trouble. Not suburbia-type shenanigans, but more like the time I had my lower vertebrae fractured after escaping three kids with baseball bats by jumping out of a 3rd story window. That and many other inner-city stories are the fodder that feed the majority of my cinemascape series.

So back to the image “a decisive moment”. This panoramic depicts a particular incident from my childhood. During the summer months on Pittsburgh North Side, me and my friends would buy a few jugs of Wild Irish Rose, the finest of all hobo wines, and take them down to drink by the defunct railroad tracks along the Allegheny River. This one particular time I had a bit too much wine and bit too little food. Combine that with the summer heat and I passed out. In an attempt to not be out after curfew and get a lashing from their parents, my friends just decided to leave without me (as seen by the departing legs in the right of the image). Although that story could still be considered dark to many, it also could be found humorous to some.

Case in point… at my recent solo opening at the Collette Blanchard Gallery in New York City, a lovely older woman came strolling into the gallery to see the work. She looked a little out of place and may have come in just for the hors d’oeuvres and wine? She had a smell about her that reminded me of the homeless. She was semi-respectably dressed and was very nice and polite. She started to ask for the artist and someone hunted me down for her. She was standing directly in front of “a decisive moment” and started chuckling.

She looked at me and laughed some more and then perhaps it was the tequila, but I started laughing as well. Once she gathered herself and stopped laughing, she commented on how she left her friend just like that just the other night. I was amazed that she assumed I knew what she meant and doubly astonished that it was the same story. We laughed a bit more and then I asked her what she thought of the other pieces. I think I spent a half hour or more of my opening talking with this street lady instead of schmoozing collectors and shooting the shit with other photographers. It was a great experience and I hope to run into her on the streets of NY again someday.

That said, I do not think the true stories behind my images are necessary to understand my work. I hope that they can be easy to read and enjoy for the common layperson as well as an Art historian. They are intended to be open ended narratives where the viewer can write their own stories in their head… and it doesn’t matter how they interpret them as long as they enjoy the interpreting them.

My newest series “femme vérite” is inspired by more recent times. In this particular series I am looking at past relationships in my life with women. Whether it’s a friend, my mother, or past lovers. Continuing to retain the self-portrait, this series is a little bit more involved that the first three (dark, even darker, and winter). I cannot just pose and switch clothes for the other character. I have to become a woman. This means shaving my legs, shaving my precious facial hair that I love, wearing false breasts, stockings, and finding the right outfits from friends who are the same size as me. Not to mention the awkward moments from strangers when I am shooting now. I’ve had a few bizarre and uncomfortable moments thus far on location.

I don’t work with assistants, but for this series I might just to have someone else “break the ice” or explain what is going on and why I am dressed in drag. One note about this series, is that I have to do a minor tweak to my files in post-processing. I typically stay away from altering or manipulating things that aren’t there or editing out things that are, but in this instance it’s a must… my Adam’s apple. Makeup or concealer won’t do the trick. Only Photoshop will permanently remove that from body. Other than that, it’s trying to master the female pose and facial expressions. I have only begun this series and hope to start in earnest this spring and hope to perhaps introduce it by way of an exhibit later this year or early 2010.

After that, who knows? Maybe I will develop a series that is inspired by events that have not yet occurred? A Lily Dale or Nostradamus inspired series about me at a very old age. Throw in the two characters from the previous series now and then to tie everything together.

Self-portrait and human sculptures by Levi van Veluw

Fabiano Busdraghi — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:08:46 +0000

Levi van Veluw is a young artist that works on self-portrait. But it does not simply photographs his face or body, he add on his skin and visage a lot of heterogeneous elements, building a complex sculpture and transforming his face in a miniature landscape. All the process is a self man work, and there is digital addition.

Fabiano Busdraghi: How did you start taking pictures? What is your history as a photographer?

Levi van Veluw: I was born in the Netherlands in a small town named Hoevelaken, 19-04-85.I graduated cum laude from Artez’ School of Arts in 2007. I started out mainly wanting to be a painter but during my time studying I started experimenting with other mediums such as video art and photography. The selfportaits started as a practical choice, but developed as a main concept in the last 3 years.

Fabiano Busdraghi: What is photography for you

Levi van Veluw: For me it’s just a medium. I use photography to registrate the sculptures on myself.

Fabiano Busdraghi: How the idea of building “landscape portraits” was born? Can you describe your work?

Levi van Veluw: I’s not just one idea. But one old fascination with cheap landscape painting. I hate all the symbolic they contain. The scenery is so predictible and boring. But in another way, I really like the simplicity of the traditional landscapes. It’s nice and ugly at the same time.

Fabiano Busdraghi: Describing your work you insist on the fact that it is a one man work. Can you explain in some details why this is so important to you?

Levi van Veluw: The work is created through several combinations of idea’s. I started experimenting with portraits a few years ago. After every photo, I analyze the work and discuss with myself what is good and what is not. Therefore it is not really a portrait, but more a series of experiments. Creating the work, is a one man process. It is very important that I make every decision while I am creating the work itself because the process is part of the work. The objects really exists on my head and not though the use of a computer.

Fabiano Busdraghi: This is another point on which you insists. Why this is so important? Is the final result or the proceeding that makes the art? What would be the difference in using a pc?

Levi van Veluw: In most cases it is my head that is the carrier of these transformations and combinations. The expressionless, and almost universal face, allows the viewer to project himself onto the work. Because the works have really existed and have not been digitally manipulated, each image contains a short history of a performance.

Fabiano Busdraghi: In one of your interview I read: “I tried to make my landscapes with as little symbolism as possible. So I kept the nice aspect of a landscape and removed all the kitsch, glamour and traditional aspects.” Can you develop this point explaining why you made this choice?

Levi van Veluw: I became more and more aware that all objects, materials, events are assigned a commonly held value, but that this valuation could just as easily be different. It was those elements that nobody had an opinion about that then became most interesting to me. Because they seem to contain little meaning to people, they are malleable and can easily have their perceptions about them altered.

Fabiano Busdraghi: In your photos you are always at the same time the photographer and the subject. Can you explain what is the meaning of this choice? Why you don’t use other peoples faces as a background for your landscapes?

Levi van Veluw: Repetition is a theme I find very interesting as you can use it for different ends. By for example using the same head and facial expression, the person slowly becomes of secondary importance to the form. The elements that remain constant lose their value and the elements that change, become the subject of the work. In this way I create a shift in the hierarchy of values.

Fabiano Busdraghi: The diffusion of your work is done by galleries, exhibitions, paper publications, etc, or is entrusted mainly to artistic circuits on Internet? What do you think about these initiatives?

Levi van Veluw: The combination of having a gallery, exhibitions, publications and the internet is really important. For instance, a gallery is important to present the work on artfairs and show and sell the work to artcollectors, museums etc. By having a gallery I have more time for making new work, ad that’s most important for me.

Fabiano Busdraghi: What are your favorite photographic and art sites? Do you read any photo e-zine, blog or online art magazine?

Levi van Veluw: Most times I read the art section of the dutch newsapers on the internet. And I like these blogs: http://pytr75.blogspot.com/ http://iheartphotograph.blogspot.com/

Fabiano Busdraghi: Do you have any photographic dream? Something you want to shoot and you can’t, some camera you dream to have, some place you want to go…

Levi van Veluw: At this moment I am really spoiled with all the succes. I have everything I want and do everything I want to do. Making new and better work will always stay my main ambition. Although I do have one majore ambition for the future, that’s setting up a new institute for arts.

Fabiano Busdraghi: Can you speak about one or more of your favorite photographer and tell us why you love his/their work?

Levi van Veluw: I like artist like, Jeff Wall and Erwin Wurm.

Fabiano Busdraghi: During the past you had been an assistant of Erwin Olaf. Can you describe your experience? How is working with a master of contemporary photography?

Levi van Veluw: Mainly working really hard for 6 months. I liked traveling to the US, France etc. I learned lot’s of things, but you also see things you want to do differently.