The Sublime
Fashion Photography as the Contemporary Sublime
Fashion Photography as the Contemporary Sublime
Trying to understand ideas of portraiture I turned to painting. Photographs revealed too much, while painting could be much more abstract. Distortions and juxtapositions in portraits inspired me as it forced me to look at the work as conceptual and not just consider the exterior. I created a series of four images, using two different girls as sitters. The girls are both positioned on a neutral gray background, mysteriously defragmented. The work was printed lifesize and mounted without frames to a grey wall which extended the neutral background that was already in the photographs. Writer Milan Kundera argues that Francis Bacon's grotesque, flesh-like portraits is like rape, striking upon them with a brush revealing them (1996, p. 11). Bacon's paintings does not in fact resemble faces the way we know them which then led me to question how Kundera could state that his work were revealing them. In Kundera's book 'Immortality' (1991) his character Agnes question the face's ability to identifiy us, because like a name it is not something we have been able to choose ourself. With my work I wish engage in this discussion.
As a reference for my work I was looking at Glen Luchford and Jenny Saville's collaboration, 'Closed Contacts'. Luchford's photographs of Saville's body pressed against glass leaving her body distorted and flesh-like the way Bacon's paintings are. This way of photographing something familiar yet as abstract as paintings, grotesque and at the same time beautiful made me start to link my own distorted images with theories on the sublime. Technology has provided image making with infinte ways to manipulate reality and play with conceptual themes.
In Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (2000), Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is discussing a more current view on the beautiful and the sublime. Gilbert-Rolfe writes that the sublime can no longer be found in nature, as suggested by Edmund Burke in the Romanticism, it can only be created by technology. Nature is limited and finite, while technology is limitless. The sublime has to be limitless in order to be vast and grand.
This inspired me to look at contemporary fashion photography as potentially sublime. Influenced by photographers such as Nick Knight and Sølve Sundsbø I wrote my final essay on fashion photography as the contemporary sublime. Due to constantly rapidly changing technology (often taken advantage of by Knight and Sundsbø in their photographs) fashion photographs has been provided with limitless and infite ways to alter the human body and find new ways to show fashion. The sublime has to be infinte to be able to terrify us and nature is no longer infinte as it was in Romanticism, technology is. The critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau has argued that fashion photography had been freed from the burden of beauty and that now fashion photographers are able to flirt with physical imperfection (2004). This way fashion photographs has been able to go beyond the exterior and play with conceptual theories of what is grand and sublime.
As a reference for my work I was looking at Glen Luchford and Jenny Saville's collaboration, 'Closed Contacts'. Luchford's photographs of Saville's body pressed against glass leaving her body distorted and flesh-like the way Bacon's paintings are. This way of photographing something familiar yet as abstract as paintings, grotesque and at the same time beautiful made me start to link my own distorted images with theories on the sublime. Technology has provided image making with infinte ways to manipulate reality and play with conceptual themes.
In Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (2000), Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is discussing a more current view on the beautiful and the sublime. Gilbert-Rolfe writes that the sublime can no longer be found in nature, as suggested by Edmund Burke in the Romanticism, it can only be created by technology. Nature is limited and finite, while technology is limitless. The sublime has to be limitless in order to be vast and grand.
This inspired me to look at contemporary fashion photography as potentially sublime. Influenced by photographers such as Nick Knight and Sølve Sundsbø I wrote my final essay on fashion photography as the contemporary sublime. Due to constantly rapidly changing technology (often taken advantage of by Knight and Sundsbø in their photographs) fashion photographs has been provided with limitless and infite ways to alter the human body and find new ways to show fashion. The sublime has to be infinte to be able to terrify us and nature is no longer infinte as it was in Romanticism, technology is. The critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau has argued that fashion photography had been freed from the burden of beauty and that now fashion photographers are able to flirt with physical imperfection (2004). This way fashion photographs has been able to go beyond the exterior and play with conceptual theories of what is grand and sublime.
