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 #2 |
 #3 |
 #4 |
 #5 |
 #6 |
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#7 |
 #8 |
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#2 |
#3 |
#4 |
#5 |
#6 |
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#7 |
#8 |
Photographs by Laki Sideris
In nude photography, the movements, undulations and vicissitudes of the body are suspended. The nude is the outcome of this disallowed temporality as the camera provides the mechanism through which the body is pictured and displaced.
Arranging Interiors is an investigation of this body and its persistence beyond its photographic capture in nude photography. In eight monochrome photographs, the nomenclature of the nude study is examined through a subtle play of surface, perceptions and fragmented effects. The unexpected focus of the camera, the cropping of each photograph, the attentiveness to the photographic surface and the detail, (such as the face of the statuette, the soles of the feet, the lamp shade, the floor boards) and the opaqueness of each photograph disrupt the language of the nude study and reveal a body that is in excess of this genre.
Each photograph in Arranging Interiors recalls this displaced body and how it persists and lingers beyond its photographic capture. The ephemeral/ghostly presence of the body (#4), the imprinting of the body against the statuette (#6), provides the most obvious instances of this failed capturing of the body in the nude study. Anamorphic effects are also frequent and introduce an unexpected temporality to each image. In the calla lilies photograph (#2), the body is seen and unseen. A shift in focus, a slight movement to the right, opens the field of the photograph to expose the body that resides within. Or again, in photograph (#5), the envelope of the reclining woman pushes into focus against the darken interior. In each photograph, there is a prolonging of the moment of recognition wherein we realise that a body has been pictured. This use of photographic excess disrupts any potential appropriation of the pictured body to the nude study. The stray hairs that cross the woman's face and which appear to scratch the surface of the photograph (#7), distract us from normative conventions of viewing.
Arranging Interiors relies upon the language of nude photography to explore the body that is its subject. In exposing this body, we are offered a glimpse of both the photographic process, but significantly the failure of nude photography to capture and contain its subject.
F Majela, December 2002.
On
exhibition until March 2003
Bocadillo
Bar 365 Brunswick St Fitzroy Melbourne 3065
03 9416 0638
