STEVE McCURRY

The Unguarded Moment


The legendary name of Steve McCurry is the first thing that pops into mind when it comes to photojournalism and travel photography at its best. Encompassing the “decisive moment” of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the tender humanism of Werner Bischoff and the agonizing social compromise of Eugene Smith, McCurry’s photography sheds bright light on a world reigned by absurdity and incongruence, celebrating dignity, endurance, and above all humanity’s extraordinary commonality despite the existent cultural, geographical and religious borders. From the mountains of Afghanistan and the monsoons of India to Cambodia, Philippines and Burma, McCurry’s prolonged journeys and stays at some of the most remote and conflictive zones of this planet have culminated into seminal images that have marked “a before and an after” in our inception of photography and the world.

For three decades, the work of Steve McCurry has been incessantly featured in National Geographic and other prominent magazines worldwide. In all these years, the world has changed. Photography has changed. More concept-driven, it has become ill critical of its proper rhetoric properties. Affect dominates intuition. Still, the way McCurry’s photography speaks to the hearts of millions of people has not been diminished in the least. In recent years, monographs such as “Portraits” (1999) “South Southeast” (2000), “In the Shadow of the Mountains” (2007) and others, all published by Phaidon, have become bestsellers with McCurry one of the Phaidon’s most prolific and well-represented authors. Now a new release entitled “The Unguarded Moment” is summed up as a companion volume to this appealing editorial offer, and especially to “South Southeast”. Of the same size and format with this latter title, the book contains an astonishing range of both recent as much as older work obtained from McCurry’s travelling across Africa, Europe and particularly Southeast Asia.

The notion of the “unguarded moment” has been regularly reappearing in McCurry’s statements over the last years. Comparing with Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, which seems to make reference to the very instant of image capturing (the subject being unmediated by the lens and the photographer somehow deciding what is to be recorded and “made” into history), the “unguarded moment” alludes more to an energy emanating from the sitter, a so-to-speak sudden revelation of an unaffected core humanness before the camera and despite it. Paraphrasing Fox Talbot’s expression, the camera becomes the pencil of the “inner” nature, and the photographic act an orchestration of situations, which sort of effortlessly seem to happen upon it.

Fishing, herding, praying, sleeping… The vernacular “rhythms” of everyday life provide the stage for an enactment. Common people in their common realities, common needs and routines —the final word belongs to them, and their houses, landscapes, rivers, mountains and lakes become the photographer’s studio. As Steve McCurry recounts, “I have always hoped that I could bring about pictures of my subjects in a natural way. I have always hoped that I could take a glimpse of their humanity and capture their essence without any deliberate attempt to reconstruct a fact or get a pose and a gesture out of them. What I ask from these people is to be themselves. Most of them have wonderful life-stories to narrate, sufficient to make the encounter fascinating”.

It is precisely in these chance encounters between the photographer and his subjects that a metaphysical-like fusion of the signified, the signifier and the punctum takes place. All converge to one by means of a mystic renunciation of the very principle of “being there” that has traditionally constituted the photographic momentum. And still, these pictures are not suggestive of an absence but rather of a sort of “elsewhereness”, of a transposition to that neutral blank moment when the yin and the yang converge and the “instant” —this seemingly insignificant suspension of history— melds into an expanding humanness of a sublime beauty and warmth. “It is the particular moment that counts”, stresses McCurry. “You can achieve amazing things and a wonderful quality by the way you relate to people. When you are before a situation with people talking, moving, gesturing, it is a question of the moment to reveal something interesting and profound of the human condition”. And he goes on to further add: “The amount of time does not necessarily correspond to the quality of the portrait. Trying to know somebody really well is not always the solution”. Neither are the words. “I do not rely much on them. Often, I do not even speak the language of my subjects. There is an interpreter and the encounters are very brief. When I photographed the “Afghan girl” in 1984, I only disposed of two or three minutes”.

Still one would wonder: Today that lens culture has penetrated even the remotest places of this planet, people who believe that the camera steals the soul are becoming less and less. Where is then the clear unmediated gaze to be found among subjects who pose before the camera with the awareness of an actor who is ready to look at you and be looked at? In a certain way, Steve McCurry’s camera unveils remote cultures and people as much as it underlines the potential eclipse of the sacred and the exotic in the twilight of westernization.

Certain pictures in “The Unguarded Moment” leave some clear hints of these changes. “Virgin” sitters confronting the lens appear alongside candid pictures taken from a clear distance or next to images of subjects seemingly absorbed, “hypnotised” by an activity, as for example in the case of the “Buddhist monks playing video games” or the “Geisha in the subway”. In these pictures, there is no direct gaze, but rather a sensation of a hurry, of a so-to-speak old world melting under a fleeting moment, as if the subjects were not aware that they were being photographed or did not care less about it. “I guess the world is changing and you have to record it”, admits McCurry. “I don’t think it makes any difference though! I don’t see any difference between photographing now and thirty years ago! The only differences today are that people want you to send them a picture and that you are shooting with a digital camera. There will always be new people and situations. Insofar as there are new songs to be written, new poems to be told, likewise there will always be a new photograph to be taken!”

Steve McCurry admits, of course, that high expectations may often break down to pieces when a situation becomes materialized. Every person is a world and every moment is uniquely different. Some situations are inevitably more truthful and interesting than others, and likewise some subjects are more manageable than others. As the children for instance, who constitute frequent protagonists in his pictures… “Children tend to be more accessible and easy to work with. They are fascinating! They never say no because they love to be playful”. With adults the situations are more confrontational and complex, but even so, McCurry has discovered the keys to his close-ups: “It is all about instincts, intuition and a bit of the universal language of humour. And trust, of course… Yes, trust!” he remarks with confidence. “It is all about making the person feeling somehow relaxed, not conscious of oneself and non-embarrassed. It is about creating a comfortable, friendly, non-threatening ambience”.

“The Unguarded Moment” constitutes one of Steve McCurry’s more intimate and personal statements. The monograph epitomizes neatly the overall philosophy and restless curiosity of a man who has had one hundred lives; of a man who has recollected the seeds of an amazing trajectory but also paid the price of following a very tough path. His eyes have born testimony to innumerable conflicts. And yet, despite the unbearably irrational cruelty of their surrounding historical circumstances, what these pictures transmit in retrospective is a gaze that has preserved a soul resistant to profound despair and nihilism. The sublime play of light and shadows, and the quasi-mystical energy underlying them are statements of an uncontested faith to humanness and a deeply rooted optimism.

What has helped Steve McCurry sustain his spirit? The passion for wandering and observing, the contact with the Buddhist stoicism, photography…? “No. It is people first and foremost”, he responds without hesitating. “People who get caught up in conflicts; good people who just happen to be in the wrong place; people one cannot help but admire and respect for their capacity to survive, their dignity, kindness and generosity despite losing everything”.

To them —not to the ones who do the fighting, but to civilians and refugees, to women and men and children who, though carrying the burdens of death, loss and refuge, preserve their smile— Steve McCurry has dedicated his inner creative urge. Over all these years, his iconic images have conferred visibility to their human stories, arising international attention and sensibility. They have also contributed in sustaining the non-profit organisation “Imagineasia” that works in collaboration with local community leaders in central Afghanistan to provide fundamental educational and health resources. “Imagineasia consists of sending very simple things such as textbooks, notebooks and pencils to universities and schools”, clarifies McCurry. “We wanted to do something very manageable, where one can actually see the benefits”. When he goes on to describe illustratively the eagerness of these children to learn and to play with the pencils and books they are given, one clearly sees how photography can contribute to a better world.

Steve McCurry is a master of colour, form and ambience. His influence has been more than paramount to the way the rhetoric of travel photography and photojournalism has been constructed over the last three decades, and yet nobody photographs like him! From the Soviet war in Afghanistan to the current Taliban conflict, from Yugoslavia and the Gulf War to mundane everyday scenes, McCurry’s images seem to preserve a life-openness imbued by the wisdom of the oriental mysticism.

Just a short look through the biography of this American-born photographer who gave up his job in a Philadelphia newspaper to make himself “a stranger in a strange land” leaves sufficient clues. For McCurry’s decision to leave back the Western civilization did not just imply wandering across Asia as a nomad with a rucksack and a camera, but, instead, a constant process of confronting and assimilating original raw cultures of a fascinating diversity, despite their geographical proximity. Such is the case of Afghanistan and Tibet. With their striking frictions, these two countries have invigorated him profoundly —Afghanistan as a place of turmoil, and Tibet as an inward, more spiritual, non-violence driven world. However, over his thirty-year career he has personally attested various times how differences in language and culture end up all being superficial when one gets to know people and their yearnings closer. “Deep down human beings are very similar”, McCurry stresses. “Ironically, one of the things that tend to generate division is religion! While spirituality is supposed to be something that should bring people together in a mutual understanding, it does completely the opposite! It often forces people to think: your way is wrong and therefore I will force you to mine”. And he concludes with the most important lesson he has gained in life: “The fundamental problem of this world is the lack of respect. It is astonishing how humans completely disregard humans and other living creatures, how poisonous civilizations can be to nature and animals! It is irrelevant if the roots of the contemporary chaos are in the Middle East or the Tigris river area. It all comes down to the fact that people do not respect each other”.

In their wisdom —a wisdom culminated by long hours of witnessing and observing the world with the camera as a “passport”— Steve McCurry’s “unguarded moments” become exceptionally universal. Though many of these visions are set against landscapes ravaged by disaster and death, they bespeak a profound appreciation of life and its wonders. By appealing to an essential humanness, the supposed “Other” becomes us. The individual gazes of these children, men and women —vulnerable and attentive, careless and warm at the same time— transcend language and culture. They reveal the remarkable range of beauty bridging the unknown and the familiar. Frontiers break and one cannot help but get carried away by the grand river of life which flows on endlessly. “We long to maintain the here-and-now but it is continually disappearing, changing, evolving”, stresses McCurry, his words reminding us of Heraclitus.

Yes, indeed, everything is in a state of flux. But, Steven McCurry has managed to suspend the moment with his camera. What remains is stillness and photography —photography articulating with humility the possibility of a new life of unguarded dignity and hope; a new life of a human kind replete of light and shadows, waters and skies.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

All pictures: Steve McCurry
Imagine Asia Foundation

Publication:
Steve McCurry, “The Unguarded Moment”.
Published by Phaidon Press, May 2009
Hardback, 156 pp
75 colour illustrations
Price: 59,95 €
ISBN 978 0 71484664 4

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THERESIA VISKA

La Danse Française

There are spirits and they can be photographed. In an uncanny, almost magical act of conjuring up the eye with the semblance of shadows, the “photographic momentum” has attested to this novel envisioning of the body enduring time. Old forgotten lives and presences have eloquently been fossilized in emulsion. The dialectics of reason have been reconciled with the metaphysics of religion, and the tangible with the intangible. To the eyes of people from all walks of life, photographs arise as the ubiquitous remains of what is deemed to evaporate and ultimately vanish with the flow of time. Be they real spirits or apparitions observed or preserved photographically, photographs are anchored between the realms of the visible and the invisible. They become, in Roland Barthes’ words, “the lexicon of each person’s idiolect”, and as such abolish any distinction between the luminous translucent flesh and the immaterial essence underlying it.

And yet, there are photographers such as Theresia Viska, who choose to cut themselves loose from this melancholy-drained envisioning of the photographic subject as an objet perdu. Viska’s overall engagement with photography shifts from representation to a performative enactment of the very “absence” the photographic speech is supposedly about. By exploiting the structural and materialist properties of the camera apparatus to their fullest, Viska’s practice proposes performing the “ghostliness” sustained by the discarnate part each one of us carries within. It is precisely this daring experiencing of the ethereal interlace between the past and the present, family genealogies and personal visions that unburdens and at the same time relieves the gaze from the “culture of trauma” photography carries on its shoulders.

Long exposures, flash, and blurriness in suspended motion… Just with a shutter release, the “here-and-now” of the photographic act becomes everything. As a living presence, it punctuates solemnity at the moment of creation. As a quintessential ingredient of perception, it bridges temporal and spatial dichotomies while conferring continuity to life. Photography ultimately becomes the container of an expanding self-openness and a medium of personal healing. The words of Theresia Viska below will attest how the miracle is produced during the photographic momentum, how the omnipresent identity beneath the skin flourishes as the image surfaces on paper…

Back in 2006, Theresia Viska debuted in these very same pages with “Stable Girls”, a series of black and white photographs in which abstract conceptualism is linked with intuitive images of infantile femininity at the crossroads of representation. Now it is not young riders but “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska’s most recent project, where this very feel of a rhythmical drifting in dreamful suspension bursts out in the form of dancing figures that dissolve into space and time. It could be real people dancing on a backdrop of a military academy at a castle in Stockholm. It could be Viska’s ancestors –knights and warriors, fathers and mothers. It could be here and now, there and then. What counts, after all, is the mood and the liberation of senses photography proposes.

The words to follow will be about the past and the present, about an ever-expanding self alimented by photography, a book, and an exhibition of ghosts, and once more about photography encompassing time, film, ceramics. At the outset of her new project, “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska is sharing her reflections with Eyemazing.

Natasha Christia: To begin with, could you describe to us how “La Danse Française” was born?

Theresia Viska: After the release of my first book “Stable Girls” in 2006, I had high expectations of what could happen, but they all sort of failed. At that time I was not aware that it takes much more than a couple of exhibitions to establish oneself. I got depressed and had no clue how to proceed with my photography. I began taking random, subject-unspecific pictures. After a couple of months, I went through the first rolls and realized that it was really something about my family and self. Then an opportunity came up out of the blue. While I was shooting a freelance assignment at the Military Academy of Stockholm, it occurred to me that I could try making photography within this context. My family has been in the army for over three hundred years. So, I solicited for permission to go back and take pictures of a personal character this time. The Academy responded affirmatively and suggested I attended their annual winter ball where the young cadets dance La Dance Française. This was an interesting idea. Both my parents and grandparents have been attending these balls. Yes that was it: I was going to take pictures of my father, mother and of all my old ancestors!

NC: When you embarked on this project were you aware that the final result would turn out to be this peculiar ghost story?

TV: I did know that some “wrong” images would come out. At the time I was shooting my random pictures, everything around me was melting —shapes and colours. All of my photographs were beautifully staged and yet, there was always something wrong about them. On the other hand, I was conscious that producing sharp images of the beautiful guests would be really dull. It would be too perfect, too neatly done. So, when I began, I would have the camera in long-shot shuttle and small flash just to obtain rather blurry images. Another factor of paramount importance was that for the “Stable Girls” book project I had spent one whole year wandering in the stables. Now, for “La Danse Française”, I just had at my disposal two or four opportunities in a year, and in each occasion, just a couple of hours. Therefore, before the ball I needed to be very clear on how to obtain images that would work and during the event be overly concentrated. Despite this, various complications arose on my way. Two of my cameras broke down and I ended up using my pocket camera. But, in the end, it all went pretty well!

NC: The way you have chosen to represent your ancestors is quite spooky. To the eyes of many people, it could even be regarded unflattering and most certainly ambivalent and grotesque. Does the project express an underlying demythologizing attitude towards the past and the notion of tradition?

TV: No, not at all. “La Danse Française” does not constitute any critical statement. It is about ghosts basically. The whole series is impregnated by the mood resembling the atmosphere of “Twin Peaks” or that movie sequence from “The Shining”, when Jack Nicholson wakes up in the middle of the night and all of a sudden there is a big party. I wanted my pictures to feel similar. I wanted the viewers to “enter” a house where they hear sounds without actually seeing something. I wanted them to feel watched by ghosts –creatures that are not necessarily mean but not normal either. Ghosts have been undoubtedly dead for a long time or since last year, which makes it normal for them to look sometimes beautiful and sometimes a little scary!

NC: I am curious to know what kind of reactions to this ghost and monster photo-tale you got from the military academy. Did they approve of your peculiar style?

TV: They were aware of my style since the beginning. I had explained my intentions clearly: I was not going to take pictures of the guests, but would work in artistic terms. When they saw the work, they thought it was fantastic. I asked them if they would like to be mentioned in the book to be released —it would be totally understandable if they did not wish to be represented like this. But they did! They are proud to be within the project! Judging from their profile—the Stockholm military academy is based at the Castle of Karlberg, a 16th century castle full of mural paintings—you would expect them to be strict and old-fashioned but this is not their case at all. They embrace contemporary culture.

NC: In comparison to your first artistic project, “Stable Girls”, which negotiates female representation in alternative spaces, “La Danse Française” is more intuitive and imagination-driven, as if the very illusory metaphysics of representation were at stake here. Form and content is diluted in movement…

TV: That was also my purpose in “Stable Girls”: Formulating a proposition in memory with less-specific images instead of a fact-based documentary practice. But here it got more intense. I let loose, wore a really nice dress, went to the ball and had a great time with my camera, this is what happened in “La Danse Française”. I may work as a press photographer on a daily basis, but no one can take my ghost images away from me!
Now, as far as blurriness is concerned, already in “Stable Girls” I was expressing my frustration with the “pure image”. My stance towards this clean aesthetic, which is so popular today in the inception of photography as an intellectual exercise, is the following: If the image is too close to your reality, with perfect colours and thorough veracity at the time of representation, photography is unnecessary. You should better exhibit the object instead. Half of the job is to make the image, and the other half “to paint” on it. You have to put your signature on the photograph when you work on it!

NC: Does this last commentary stand for as an explanation for the presence of so many autobiographical elements in your work? It is as if you regarded necessary for photography to establish a link with your life in order to obtain a sense...

TV: According to my point of view, if you make a photo-story about something you do not relate to, it can be up to 99% perfect. Still, if you have an emotion about it, there is a little more percentage added to this, and this little bit makes the difference. It costs so much money, effort and time to bring a project ahead, so a strong inner motivation is essential in order to keep going!

NC: And photography? What input has photography had in your life?

TV: I was always having a really hard time at school. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was trying out different kind of jobs —working at a restaurant, taking care of the elderly—or was just traveling around. When I met my husband about eight years ago, we decided, why not take a photography course, travel around taking pictures and selling them? So, in 2001, I enrolled to a one-year photography course. For the first assignment, whose theme was “contact”, I went back to my old stable and took pictures of the girls. When I came out of the darkroom and showed the images to my teacher, he was impressed. That was it. Magic! It had always been so difficult to express myself with words and finally somebody had understood me thanks to photography. The camera helped me canalise my high energy and express myself, and this was such a relief. At last, I could concentrate. Nothing was actually wrong with me! Paradoxically I don’t travel that much anymore. When I make photography, it is more like travelling to my own world. I stay more at home now; I feel more at home now!

C: So, do you feel even closer to yourself after completing this series?

TV: I feel relieved. I reached my comfort zone and hopefully it will be different afterwards. I like the grotesque. I like to surprise people, to make the beautiful vulgar. Hopefully I will continue though I have no idea about the future!

NC: But you must have some plans for “La Danse Française”!

TV: Yes, definitively! In November, when it gets darker, a ghost exhibition opens at the KG52 gallery in Stockholm. I am currently working with an art director in an artist’s book similar to “Stable Girls” to accompany the exhibit. I have also asked a history teacher to have a look through the diary my grandfather wrote when he was soldier in the Finish winter war in the 1940s. He will contribute additional text inspired from this source…

NC: This is an interesting element. It provides another dimension to the non-site specific, timeless images of the series.

TV: The series becomes more reality-based, I guess. There will be real whispers from ghosts in my images, although my grandfather managed to survive this war!

NC: What about the movement and blurriness present in your pictures? Are they suggestive of an interest in shifting to film in the near future?

TV: Actually, yes! I will accompany “La Danse Française” series with a video that consists of a close-up portrait of a small girl, my 11 year-old niece, sleeping on water. The video will be projected at the narrow gallery corridor and will be the first thing the visitor will see when entering from the street. The main show will be featured at the gallery’s main space, which is hosted at the cellar below.

NC: This all sounds like a dream-state regression to your childhood…

TV: Well, the film is not a direct hint to my early years. It rather alludes to the fever dreams of ice and water I used to have as a child, while expressing the feeling I have chosen for the whole series to breathe—a watery and greyish feeling similar to the aspect of my ghost images. But, besides film, I am also experimenting with other type of media as well, which will attribute multiple modes of experiencing to the whole series. There will be, for example, a wall with different ceramic masks of faces forced onto the ghosts. These masks allude to the face we assume when partying around with people, when, for instance, we are laughing at something when it is not funny.

NC: As I can understand then, you do not draw inspiration solely from photography…

TV: Very little, to be honest. I am rather inspired from excellently written books, the movies or the theatre. I love culture! I try to see as much as non photography-related art as possible. Today there are so many people taking pictures with a camera, and that is good, but unfortunately, there is too so much bad photography as well.

NC: What is bad photography for you?

TV: When you are not using the camera 100% but just 50%. Everyone can take a picture but, you know, this is simply just not enough…

NC: As if there were too much concept, at the expense of photography?

TV: Exactly. As if the concept was good but the rest needless. This is why I find it more challenging to get a grip on other genres of art. I think nowadays we, photographers, do not take on challenges with our proper apparatus. A photograph can be so extremely good but overly boring as well. My only wish is to see more experiment with the camera and the photograph!

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

Published in Eyemazing 03/2009

JEN DAVIS

Self-portraits


If we were to attempt a contextual reading of this contemporary photographic representation, it would most certainly be in the area of the self-portrait where all the issues at stake are to be found. Since Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills, self-portraiture has become the field where the aesthetics and the politics of representation converge into a subversive whole that dynamises the coherence of orthodox representation. Self-portraiture has provided the stage for the enactment of a friction inherent in all representation: the friction between reality and fiction, inner and collective self.

In this expression of photography’s existential concerns, the lens does not unveil the subject but, contrary to what is expected, masks it. The outcome is a photographic surface that obscures vision and blurs the frontiers between what is represented and what is not, jeopardizing the very metaphysical envisioning of photography as the potential “mirror of the soul”. In a schematic paraphrase of the Lacanian discussion of the gaze, the mirror breaks and the lens becomes a vehicle of transportation to an “elsewhereness”, whence what is projected is not the physical idol of the self but the self after the image. In this “elsewhereness”— not in the absence of the subject, but in its distortion and resurrection as the embodiment of otherness — the fluidity of representation cancels what the retina longs to see. A window opens and speech is conferred to the “Other”. This unfamiliar and uncanny “Other”, in aesthetic, political or gender terms, does not simply aliment the overall practice of portraiture today but provides it with its raison d’être.

The portfolio of the photographer Jen Davis is an exemplary case of this tendency. In her Self-Portraits, a series, which she has been methodically building up since 2002, Davis directs her gaze and content to herself as an overweight American woman subjected to the pressures and expectations of the outside world. By displaying and thus defeating her insecurities about body image, Davis lends her own “otherness” a space of representation. Formulated as a voluntary conceptual statement addressed to a generic matrix of gender categories, her oeuvre acquires a broader symbolic value, while instructing perception and interpretation into a complex, yet very precise network of gender, politic and aesthetic relations.
The pictures show Davis in her domestic settings and surroundings. Associated with food, many of these moments provide visual testimony for a personal documentary of obesity tinged with loneliness and culpability. We often see Davis in mundane everyday-life scenarios —watering plants in her garden, hanging her knickers on a clothesline, or on the beach in the company of friends— yet we cannot help but feel her presence as the subtle intrusion of an outsider carrying the burden of a body that inhibits social interaction.

Davis scarcely confronts the camera and the viewers. More often than not, she seems to direct her gaze towards a vantage point outside the picture. From a distance, we observe her in moments of self-absorption, watching the external world through her window. Walls, pillars, door frames and other architectural elements rise between Davis and us, break our field of vision into pieces, and obstruct our act of looking at her. As such, they punctuate the uneasiness of our perception and its potentially conditioning force in the misconception of her being and life.
In this confinement of flesh and perception, the house becomes the “wrapper” of the self but also an off-limits space. The house seals, conveys and protects, as much as it allows for spontaneous moments of personal recognition to take place. In the intimacy of her bedroom, Davis is gradually able to overcome the oppressive external gaze and perform her sensuality and self. The body is the undisputed protagonist in these sequences of close-ups — body, flesh and silky skin unfolding restlessly beneath the shower towel, expanding playfully all over the frame, constituting the main volume of the photographic surface. We can feel, sense the odour and touch this “Other”. The distance between our eye and the photographic reality becomes dissolved like never before.

By eliminating this distance, Davis’ self-directed gaze unavoidably strikes us. Overweight women may have been at their best in Baroque art, but with this exception, fashion photography and television have done much excluded them and worshipped the thin silhouette instead. Alongside the queerness of Diane Arbus, and the plethoric dominant women of Federico Fellini, Jen Davis proposes an alternative set of representations that “naturalise” the female body, with its abundant curves and sensuality. And yet, it does not end there.

From the tense scrutiny of her first images, seeking to heal the victimised self, Davis goes on further to conduct a wide-ranging exploration of this unseen “Other” femininity. Moreover, she veils this femininity anew with a masquerade of sensuality and eroticism that still allows a view of her chapped legs. For, she has finally come to terms with herself. As a result, she is free to appropriate and critically rework the stereotypical patterns of female representation. Her self-perception dominates our perception as viewers and validates her actions before our eyes. She has finally taken control.

This latter element becomes particularly evident in Davis’ more recent series of men in I ask in Exchange, which stages a hypothetical and fictional relationship between the artist-subject and her half-dressed male companions. Here, an inner and powerful female gaze materializing sexual fantasies in a commodity world substitutes the external gaze of her earlier self-portraits. The unmediated eroticism and sensuality of these pictures put into effect an extreme objectification of a body suppressed by its “to-be-looked-at-ness”. It is as if the mere enactment of a role before the camera were sufficient for Davis to become that “Other” she has long yearned for in these pictures since she becomes both a protagonist and a symbol of attraction, both a bearer and a maker of meaning.

It is precisely this clash between the objectified body and its striking otherness that produces uneasiness when contemplating Jen Davis’ photographs. We feel compelled to question the actual possibility of this really happening. We are tempted to think in terms of a staged narrative progress, longing for a resolution. We expect the body to transform into something else as the series evolves. But resolution never comes.
Over these recent months, Jen Davis’ work has obtained an unexpected parallel, the fairytale ascension and descent of Susan Boyle in Britain’s Got Talent. The tension of our gaze tagging Davis with admiration, as an “emerging twenty-something overweight female photographer”, in a way revives the collective euphoria of the program’s audience towards a woman whose looks absurdly excluded the possibility of her having a decent voice. At first glance, even Davis’ artist statement seeks to render her Self-Portraits effective in this sense; it is so politically correct that is hard to resist. But it is worth doing so. It is precisely when we decide not to consume the “myth” of the photographic surface but rather see beyond its raison d’être on the level of perception that paradoxically Jen Davis’ photographs become effective. They become effective and meaningful to the extent they impart us with the awareness of the narrowness of preconceptions about beauty. The disjunction between the gaze and photography’s stillness calls for an energising of our consciousness. Insofar as the body succumbs to the lens, it becomes nothing but a masquerade and nothing but an image; no less than a copy without an original and no more than a body after an image.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

Published in 1000 Words 5/July 2009