"Think
cupcakes and hair ribbons, lace and snowflakes. Think Maria von Trapp,
the Jeans West girl and Elmer Batters. As a mix of imagery, these
things might be thought of as softcore, they move us some way toward
entering Deborah Paauwe’s world of happy-sad photographs of young
girls. It’s a nice place to be. Adelaide-based Paauwe was born in
Pennsylvania in the United States in 1972 and moved to South Australia
in 1985. Since graduating from the University of South Australia with a
Bachelor of Arts degree (Visual Arts) in 1993 and then a Post-Graduate
Diploma in Arts Management (1995) she has been producing what catalogue
essays refer to as “Deborah Paauwe images”. Paauwe has a prêt-à-porter
iconography, a basic, though perfected formula of intense primary
colours, soft skin, plush fabric, close cropping, flooded light and a
candy coating. A Paauwe picture oozes sweetness. But, deliberately,
euphemistically crude (often corny) titles make all this saccharine
loveliness shrivel up into something a bit sexy and quite often
enigmatic. The artist pushes her carefully crafted aesthetic to the
limit and makes it stick, and this is her real strength. Due in part to
these distinctive features, Paauwe’s photographs have been included in
the exhibition Photographica Australis at the Sala del Canal de Isabel
II in Madrid as part of the ARCO 2002, she was the recipient of a
Samstag Scholarship in 1999 and she appears in the books of Greenaway
Art Gallery in Adelaide and Sutton Gallery in Melbourne. Paauwe’s
photographs were also included in the exhibition ‘the syntax of style’
at the Australian Centre for Photography in 2001, which featured
artists “who exploit the language of fashion photography in the pursuit
of art”. This was one of the first instances of Paauwe’s photographs
curated under the direct rubric of fashion photography and its
mediation through advertising. While studying in London during 2000
(courtesy of the Samstag) at the Chelsea College of Art & Design,
Paauwe worked at the vintage clothing store Steinberg and Tolkien and
borrowed the clothes featured in many of her photographs from the
‘Sugar Nights’ series (2000). The cropped and fragmented bodies from
this and other series such as ‘Blue Room’ (1998) and ‘Tuesday’s Child’
(2001) are reminiscent of those images produced by a number of
contemporary fashion photographers. Of interest on this point is German
born Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969), one of the first fashion/art
photographers to allow body parts to stand in for the whole, deploying
the lessons of avant garde cinema. His famous eye and lip image for the
cover of Vogue in January 1950, for example, confuses the commercial
nature of fashion photography with the more experimental imperatives of
art, rendering the genre as a stage for performative images. But while
many in the industry have produced metonymical images, the
narrative/fantasy elements of contemporary fashion photography that
encompass a sex-death tension are regular commuters between the art and
fashion worlds. For instance, the work of Japanese fashion photographer
Izima Kaoru fully exploits a very particular art-fashion nexus. At
Kaoru’s invitation, models and celebrities have been given the
opportunity to imagine their own deaths – an outfit, a location and a
scenario; drowned in Donna Karan, overdosed in Oroton or shot in
Chanel. His photographs express something of the ‘beautiful victim’
mood that sometimes grips fashion photography (think Nick Knight,
Juergen Teller) but which was flaunted by the Surrealists, who
constantly depicted women as abstractions or represented them by a mess
of metaphors for femininity.
Under surrealism, woman’s preferred form was a mannequin, itself a
compromised object that found its most extreme form in Hans Bellmer’s
erotic, often headless, dummy The Doll, of which he made many versions
during 1930s. The sculpture’s white ankle socks and baby-doll shoes
mixed with well developed thighs and overly pouty, often dual, vulvas
made it a woman-child beast. Bellmer would slump it against a chair,
under a bush or string up in a piñata-style contortion to be
photographed. Many of Paauwe’s works also have this discordant and
unharmonious quality, of ugliness and awkwardness as a sort of beauty –
so polished and perfect at times so as to seem unreal. They are
beautiful like champagne and chocolates are beautiful but with a
wonderful perversity, derived from minor imperfections on the model’s
skin. In short, the particular and the physical draw us in and then
away from these idealised scenarios. Although they are staged in pretty
dress-ups, the girls are often bound, bruised, grazed, scarred and
scratched, with chipped nail polish on their dirty fingernails upon
hands with Texta scribblings...Paauwe guillotines the girls’ identity
from the available body of evidence; they are removed from any sense of
having a definite past or a possible future in the way Bill Henson’s
teen models can be thought of addicts, prostitutes and runaways.
However, they have a similar sexual agency. As Anne Marsh states,
drawing on Freud, in her catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘Telling
Tales: The Child in Contemporary Photography’, children “express
themselves erotically and they aspire to grown up desires”. A Peeling
(1998/99), Show of Hands (1998/99) and Lather (1998/99) for example,
are seemingly innocuous but introduce a deliberate lack of innocence,
prompting us to consider what has been carefully constructed. Equally,
Silent Sleeping Beauty (2000) rests like a corpse, restrained and
almost mummified by her Victorian dress. While in the narrative pair,
Restless Sleeping Beauty (2000) pictures a girl waking from her
solitary dreams, not to the kiss of Prince Charming but to her own
self-made pleasures. Child sexuality in these images is just one more
mask for us to consume – newness and youth, innocence and nubility
function as inviolable attractions to acts of violation... Like most
pedophiliac representations – where the subject is represented through
the desires of the camera-wielding adult – the child is made to adopt a
deliberately inflexible, artificially aesthetic posture. Whether or not
this is the intention, Paauwe’s images escape being creepy. It would
seem, of course, that as a woman photographer (like Julia Margaret
Cameron or Sally Mann), Paauwe’s photographs of young women and girls
are naturally understood as being derived from an artistic interest
that involves a parity of power structures and secret girls’ business.
The placement of herself in the photographs too, means that whatever is
tellable about the treatment or presentation of these models must also
be true for Paauwe. So while these photographed bodies take on, in a
formal sense, the eternal quality of ancient Greek sculpture and are
rigid, headless, handless, fragmentary beauties, they are also child
goddesses. Simultaneously, they are untouchable, young, pristine and
‘brand new’ as well as available...Precariously positioned between
child and adulthood, the painful transition through puberty is publicly
explored as ‘come on’ gestures are made clumsily and deliberately.
Paauwe continually questions whether or not we can appreciate innocence
now without bringing cynicism to bare on our ideas about what childhood
represents. In light of such cases as the JonBenet Ramsey and James
Bulger murders – where children are not just the victims but also the
perpetrators of malicious crimes – this may be even harder. The
notorious evil-child roles in films such as The Exorcist (1973) and The
Omen (1976) remind us that popular culture has long envisioned children
as the faces of innocence behind absolute terror...like much of
Paauwe’s work, construct a version of femininity that flirts with the
ancient stereotypes of women as either Madonnas or whores. However, the
kind of John Berger reductionist view that, ‘men act and women appear’
seems too simple with which to tackle the work of Paauwe. These works
operate within our more permissive (post)feminist moment where the kind
of spectatorial pleasures disavowed by critics such as Laura Mulvey are
being reaffirmed. Paauwe’s photographs of disconnected, cropped bodies
are not a contemporary critique of representations of the female form,
artistic or otherwise. One almost suspects that collectors of Paauwe’s
works are likely to be female, like her commentators.© Kate Rhodes 2002
Kate Rhodes is Curator at Craft Victoria. She was formerly a curator of
photography and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Victoria
from 2001-06.
traveling
with the ghost: David Vasiljevic × Magdalena Frackowiak ...
David Vasiljevic × Magdalena
Frackowiak - Lollipop Girl ドーリー・ガール - ... Title: Lollipop Girl
Photographer: David Vasiljevic ...
travelinghost.blogspot.com/.../david-vasiljevic-magdalena-frackowiak.html
traveling
with the ghost: Jacqueline Roberts
12 Oct 2009 ... ラベル: girls, hair, photography, portrait, 横たわった少女 ...
Greg Kadel (6); grotesque (51); Guinevere van Seenus (6); gun (35);
hair (87); Hans Bellmer (5) .... David Vasiljevic × Magdalena
Frackowiak - Lollipop. ...
travelinghost.blogspot.com/2009/10/jacqueline-roberts.html
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