photography – lesley's headspace

Chimerism + Twinship

Extremely interesting article I found in my Saved Links section on Facebook. Saved Links is easily my favourite Facebook feature because all the quality stuff is there. Here are some of the more inspiring/quirky bits:

“Indeed, if you are a twin, you are particularly likely to be carrying bits of your sibling within your body and brain. Stranger still, they may be influencing how you act.”

“During early development, cells can be passed between twins or triplets. Once considered a rare occurrence, we now know it is surprisingly common. Around 8% of non-identical twins and 21% of triplets, for example, have not one, but two blood groups: one produced by their own cells, and one produced by “alien” cells absorbed from their twin. They are, in other words, a chimera – a fusion of two bodies – and it may occur in many organs, including the brain.”

“Perhaps chimerism has upset the balance.”

“Even if you do not think you ever had a twin, there are many other ways you might be invaded by another human’s cells. It’s possible, for instance, that you started off as two foetuses in the womb, but the twins merged during early development. Since it occurs at such an early age of development, the cells can become incorporated into the tissue and seem to develop normally, yet they are carrying another person’s genetic blueprint. “You look like one person, but you have the cells of another person in you – effectively, you have always been two people,” says Kramer.”

This article is accompanied by Ariko Inaoka’s beautiful, dreamy photographs of a pair of Icelandic twins, Erna and Hrefna. I’ve picked out my favourites from her portfolio.

On her website, Ariko Inaoka has commentaries from the twins as well as her own personal thoughts on the project.

Mise en scène: Joel-Peter Witkin

“Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy amazed the world with one of the finest definitions of art in What Is Art? (1897). He argues, “A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.” The core quality of art, Tolstoy calls “infectiousness” – which increases with the level of the artist’s “sincerity.” Tolstoy concludes that when we are “infected by the feelings which the author has felt, it is art.”

In Joel-Peter’s photographs, the “infectiousness” comes from deep empathy for his physically deformed models – the hermaphrodites, teratoids, transsexuals, bearded women, dwarfs, giants, people with horns, wings, tails, enormous genitals, people without legs, arms, genitals, breasts, eyes, ears, lips or nose. He draws on the history of great paintings of people with so-called “abnormalities” – from Bosch, Goya and 17th century English and Spanish portraits of royals surrounded with dwarfs – to subvert socially accepted conventions of physical normalcy.”

from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lita-barrie/the-art-of-empathy-joelpe_1_b_5559157.html

Mise en scène is a French term that refers to the way a stage or environment (i.e. in film) is arranged. Besides the fact that I’m still very taken by the French language, there’s no better term to describe these images by Joel-Peter Witkin that Astrid recommended I look at for inspiration.

They’re delightfully bizarre and also very human in the way that Witkin depicts his physically deformed models in some of his photographs – I especially like the model posed to resemble a Greek/Roman marble, because that subverts the conventional way of seeing deformity with the idea that despite their missing limbs and heads we often regard marble sculptures as the pinnacle of human beauty as depicted in art, therefore why not confer the same status of beauty on a deformed body? This reminds me also of Marc Quinn’s work – he explores many ideas about the body in his sculptures but his aesthetic isn’t quite as relevant to me at this point.

Most people would find these images uncanny in their mood and appearance – this is crucial to me in my visual explorations, that I surround myself with such visuals to immerse my practice and process in this aesthetic.

Bruce Gilden: Face

‘Here are Bruce Gilden’s people, his family. He shares their teeth, their stubble, their scrapes and blemishes, their fear of death. In the women’s scowls, in their sternly ambiguous glances, he sees his own mother’s face, before she killed herself.

We live in a world whose visual lingua franca has rapidly become the decontextualized, always posed, mechanically lit idiom of social media, of Instagram and, yes, Facebook (and whatever their successors might be). Far from rejecting this environment, Bruce’s portraits embrace it and grapple with it. They say to the viewer: So, you’ve constructed your ‘social network’ out of aspirational pictures, of yourself and of your ‘friends’, but what space does that leave for these people? They are my ‘face book’ friends. You need to look at them – at us – too. You can’t make us disappear with digital photo filters and social media platforms that act as a real world filter, sifting from your ‘community’ all that is discomfiting. We are here, closer than you might remember.‘ (edited from the essay by Chris Klatell).

A defining characteristic of Bruce Gilden’s photography is his creative attraction to what he calls ‘characters’, and he has been tracking them down all through his career. Growing up in Brooklyn with what he describes as a ‘tough guy’ of a father, Bruce Gilden developed a love of the streets, often calling them his ‘second home’. The unique energy of the streets mesmerized Bruce, an energy that can momentarily expose something inside people that generally stays hidden. This new body of work, however, is somewhat of a departure for him in that these tightly cropped, full face images can be seen as ‘collaborative’ portraits. His subjects engage directly with the camera, and the photographs are all taken with permission. Gilden has travelled and exhibited widely around the world, and has received numerous awards, including the European Publishers Award for Photography, three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Japan Foundation fellowship.

http://www.dewilewis.com/products/face

This is the second Bruce Gilden series I’m going to look at. It’s tangentially relevant because I’ll be dealing with drawings of faces and I want to be able to create a project that makes the same kind of commentary, except perhaps with psychosomatic diseases/the power of the mind. I’ve reframed my FYP around a very specific topic and I’m going to crystallize that in the next (few?) posts.

Bruce Gilden: Coney Island

Towards the end of the 1960s, one year after he first picked up a camera, Bruce took the subway train through Brooklyn to capture the sunbathers, the weekenders, the sideshow booths and the Cyclone rollercoaster of Coney Island. The world famous Brooklyn amusement park has been the subject of many photographers, but no one has ever managed to eke out its characters and eccentricities with such a brutal honesty.

http://www.brucegilden.com/portfolio/coney-island/

Bruce Gilden’s work reminds me a lot of the photography of Diane Arbus.

Axel Dupeux | Ryan Matthew Cohn

I came across this series of photographs by Axel Dupeux of collector Ryan Matthew Cohn. It’d be a neat visual reference for all the bizarre images I want to incorporate.

Emma Kisiel’s ‘At Rest’ Series

Emma Kisiel’s At Rest Series

“At Rest is a photographic series depicting roadkill on American highways and addressing our human fear of confronting death and viewing the dead. My images draw attention to the fact that, while man has a vast impact on animal and natural life, generally in American society, people are separate from wildlife and the souls of animals have little value. To cause the viewer to feel struck by this notion, I photograph memorials I have built surrounding roadkill at the location at which its life was taken. At Rest expresses the sacredness to the bodies of animals hit by vehicles while crossing the road. Statement revised 2014.”

I find this series oddly beautiful and macabre. In the same vein as my explorations on mortality, I’d say it isn’t necessary to do what I’ve been doing at the moment and make death all about skulls, etcetera (thanks, Vishaka, for the feedback). I could go with something macabre but this photo series is rather inspirational in that it makes death something more restful and memorializes the oft-ignored roadkill.