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.

Portraiture and the attempt to capture or visualize identity have always been the focus of my practice. Over the course of the last years, I thought a lot about portrait photography and what I am able to tell about a person in a portrait. I started to question the power of an image and what it can actually reveal. I was at a point where I needed a bit of departure from the way I had approached the sujet. This is how the project Mimesis emerged. Earlier this year I was fortunate to have work from the Mimesis series included in a group show called “l’Autre visage” at the Centre Photographique Pole Image Haute-Normandie in Rouen, France. The exhibition focuses on “the other face”, the one that is hidden and not necessarily seen on the surface, and addresses themes of the universal rather than the individual. Here is a little insight from Raphaëlle Stopin, the show’s curator: “The paradox of portraying interiority was part of the original Greek concept of mimesis. It consisted in pinpointing the sacred quality of being—its dark side, its inner form—within a representational scheme of recognisable forms. Therefore one could say that the portrait acts as a space where the Other can be captured, beyond notions of face, skin, or even the “second skin”embodied by the surface of the canvas or the photograph. Since the issue of alterity is of such importance to the portrait as a genre, the question is how to approach this vast subject. Deliberately fragmentary and selective, the exhibition titled L’Autre visage (“The Other Face”) attempts to address the portrait as inhabited by alterity, keeping within the boundaries of a strict framework. And this delineation stems from the moment in history when artists began attacking the integrity of photography and the printed image. Revealing alterity through alteration. … The aim of these artistic practices was no longer to capture the identity of a specific subject that would require identification, but to harness the portrait as an incarnation of a shared body. The photographic portrait as articulated in this exhibition does not express any morphological resemblance nor individuality. Quite the opposite—the portrait is the space where an archetype of the ordinary is born. Photography—a medium first thought to be used for faithful reproductions — therefore gradually emancipated itself from such constraints and brought forth the unformed, emphasizing the uncertain, or even the unspeakable. Conjuring depth on the surface of an image requires disturbing its still reflection. Engravings, gashes, embroideries, abrasions and cuts carry out such a task. In a period no longer concerned with certainty, the face is often evasive. And it is precisely this erasure of features that brings to light another portrait, one of a fragmented, damaged, composite interiority. From there on, the archetype can address every one of us.” The exhibition includes works of Erwin Blumenfeld, Jonny Briggs, Julie Cockburn, Amie Dicke, Douglas Gordon, Sabrina Jung, Jean-François Lepage, Birthe Piontek, Stéphanie Solinas, John Stezaker, Lorenzo Vitturi, Hannah Whitaker and runs until October 1st 2016. Pôle Image