Dead Starlets
November 14th 2007 02:30
New Zealand photographer Yvonne Todd (www.ervon.com) makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. I find her photographs hilarious and devastating. I feel both far from and close to these afflicted and lacklustre women, somewhere between runners-up in a beauty pageant and zombies. I sense their malaise but they are too dehumanised, phlegmatic and unreachable for me to be truly empathetic.
Her rigidly formulaic images of unthreatening, pristine, uptight and wax-like women reveal on closer inspection that they are muffled and numb, sterile and barren, broken and sickly. Something is off. But then, everything is just right.
Each detail in Todd’s work is a premeditated execution, a studied process of construction that plays with the uncomfortable formality of studio portraiture. They are controlled like Maybelline advertisements and the stark simplicity of the compositions combined with the flat antiseptic lighting expose the artist’s obsessive command of detail.
The boredom in the images also intrigues because it exists alongside and within the notion of glamour. A blandness comes out of the mix between ugly and beautiful, prim and perverted, pathetic and heroic, and it carries an unexpected humour.
Her work can be situated in the ongoing exploration of the complex relationship between photography and truth. With the growing awareness of photography as subjective and fictionalising came the genre of ‘fabricated photography’. Fact, fiction and fantasy were blurred in sets that were created just for the camera lens, and little was left to chance.
Rather than seeing it as a medium to capture the existing external world, artists like Gregory Crewdson, Laurie Simmons and Philip-Lorca diCorcia use photography to fashion alternate universes that are choreographed and self-contained. Like in Todd’s work, the glossy depthlessness and artificiality aren’t detracting; they are the very subject matter.
Todd can also be compared to a series of women photographers who work with costume portraiture to show the elasticity and malleability of female identity. Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman and Tomoko Sawada are three such artists whose work combine photography and performance art. Like Todd, they meddle with the tensions between truth and appearance, gender and aspiration, beauty and objectification. Using the body as a canvas to configure certain identities, they reveal that ‘femininity’ is a performance.
Todd’s fictional female characters playfully provokes mass-sanctioned ideals of beauty and confront the universal themes of isolation, suppression, vulnerability, stoicism, boredom and disappointment.
| 94 |
| Vote |
Subscribe to this blog
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
Comment by Louie
Climate Red
randomthoughts
Phil's Wellness Tips
Comment by Michaelie
Flick Wit
Michaelie
Comment by Lilla
From The Home Front
Enviro Warrior
Dream Herald
Esoteric Bookshop