A Portrait of Ella Manor - Preface

Artists often look inside themselves in order to ignite the creative flame. The history of art and artists is replete with self portraits. Such personal images have been one of the tools that artists employ for various, often complex and private reasons.

Recently, a young Israeli born, New York-based photographer, Ella Manor, came to the attention of the editors of Double Exposure. Her personal vision is often challenging as it seems to ask the viewer to suspend any preconceived sense of what is reality and to follow the photographer into a world that is sometimes dark, yet always visually and emotionally demanding.

Her self portraits and fine art work can elicit a variety of feelings in the viewer. The images suggest a multifaceted range of conflicting needs and passions that are not completely understood by the artist herself. Ella is also a member of Photoworkshop.com. I recently had the opportunity to interview Ella for Double Exposure.

Jerry Currier
Double Exposure Magazine

Of Fashion Victims and Beautiful Monsters

Like Man Ray, Dianne Arbus, and Richard Avedon, all of whom honed their unmistakably fine art visions at “Vogue”, Manor marries form and content with an élan that makes a mockery of distinctions between high and low. Her pictures intrigue one by investing what is sometimes considered superficial, even trivial, with a suggestiveness that speaks of fate, mortality and other issues more profound that one is accustomed to encountering in the precincts of the fabulously trendy.

At the same time, lest one misinterprets her pictures, it is more important to be aware that Manor is creating Metaphors rather then being literal. Thus masks are a favorite motif, mingled in one personal picture with ghostly overlapping self portraits that seem to speculate wryly on how the artist’s penchant for role playing could possibly precipitate a genuine identity crisis.

Gender is also up for grabs- or at least fluid- in some of Manor’s photographs, as seen in one image in her digital Fashion portfolio of a model with her luxuriant mane pinned back out of view on one side and a stubble drawn into her face, suggesting a more beautiful tongue-in-chic update on those half-man half-woman hoaxes in sleazy carnival sideshows.

But perhaps the real showstopper of the site is a picture in which Manor, her lips dripping fake blood, hovers sinisterly over a nude model with fang-marks on her neck. At first glance, it could look like a spoof of Charles Busch’s off-Broadway camp classic “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” Then it dawns on one that Ella Manor may be alluding to something deeper and more universal: how all artists draw their life’s blood from their models or muses.

Ed McCormack
Gallery & Studio MagazIne