Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Les Tortures Volontaires by Annette Messager (2013) “These archival prints were extracted from a set of photographs discovered by Messager (printed in 1972) in a long forgotten closet. The dated works’ theme—the great lengths to which a woman will go to make herself physically attractive—still resonated to the artist who decided to reprint the images. The resulting series, Les Tortures Volontaires (the voluntary tortures), consists of pictures culled from magazines and advertisements from the ’70s. “Today bodies and faces are remodeled, redesigned, dreamed up, but still standardized according to the collective criteria of our contemporary society,” says Messager. “Unlike wine, which alters and develops its full bouquet as it ages, we human beings continually fight against this natural process of time.”” I rarely buy artists books, as I like so many I would break my bank balance. But I couldn’t resist this one. I love these images, it again taps into my interest for human interaction with objects.