Flora
The portraits, shot in a style reminiscent of 1930-50s celebrity glamour images, staged and theatrical, are evocative of a bygone age. However, Flora is anchored in the present, informed by an understanding that fantasy personas can be superficially occupied and manipulated in front of the camera. Like my earlier works, Flora functions within the inter-relationship of nature, artifice and perception.
Various portraits by fashion, Hollywood and society photographers during the 1930-50s such as Cecil Beaton, George Hurrell, Horst P. Horst and Angus McBean, were influential in Flora’s development. The 1935 Goddesses series of colour portraits by British photographer Madame Yevonde was also hugely informative particularly for its camp and surreal qualities. What struck me about these early works is their highly constructed nature, coupled with the fact that the photographer and sitter, often well versed in the same classic narratives and mythologies, appeared to cooperate readily in role-play. I am fascinated by the dynamics of portraiture, especially when familiarity between photographer and subject shapes the evolution of the final image[1].
Flora explores an extreme, stylised form of femininity and the associations between fantasy and female beauty. This area continues to be ripe for examination given the ever-burgeoning pressure on the human body to be ‘perfect’ and therefore unrealistic; notwithstanding the knowledge of identity politics and how the vast array of images in circulation operates on our unconscious. Central to my project is the rejection of conventional fashion models and instead, an engagement with photographing mature women in their early thirties and upwards. A key motivation has been to understand how an image is manifested when two friends, who not only share history, intimacy and trust, but also a recognition that our bodies exhibit years of lived experience, collaborate in its construction.
Each portrait began with my stipulation that the chosen plants were already used as women’s names. My collaborators then selected the flora with which to be associated. In many instances, friends also suggested themes or emotions such as melancholy or innocence that they wanted to convey. In addition, each of the sitters brought an item to include in their portrait, thereby integrating a tangible element of the partnership into the compositions. For example, several years ago, painter Melanie Rose created a canvas of pink roses and the inclusion of this object in Melanie with Roses influenced the palette of organza fabrics within the set.
I am conscious that when a portrait of a woman is taken, it automatically enters into a dialogue with beauty and fashion photography and consequently, with issues surrounding digital retouching. With Flora, I wanted to define my ‘truth’ to photography by what is feasible following a non-digital process. In other words, what do regular women look like and how does skin, muscle and fat behave when confining oneself to the beautifying properties of hair and make-up products, the magic of body-shaping garments like Spanx, controlled studio lighting and the image manipulations executable in an analogue darkroom?
A 1938/9 portrait by Madame Yevonde titled Edwardian Girl shows a woman appearing through a swag of flowers with a bird perched on one hand. On closer inspection, one sees that the set is clumsily put together with string and safety pins and that post-shoot, the emulsion on the print surface has been scratched away to reduce the puffiness of the model’s sleeve. This image encapsulates an important objective of Flora; the desire to tumble into a fecund vision and yet concurrently, to be restrained from doing so, by the overt construction of the photographic illusion. The rough quality of Yevonde’s fabrications also gave me permission to express my love of craft, whether through the cutting and drawing of birch trees, the painting of a canvas to resemble a tiled floor, or the production of hundreds of crepe paper irises. Despite the photographs suggesting an almost amateurish assemblage, the many decisions about hairstyles and make-up, props, sets and poses, in addition to the technical aspects of the images, were considered with great care. Moreover, given my obsession with detail, Flora was shot using a large format view camera so that the images could reveal much for scrutiny.
The title of each Flora image begins with the first name of my sitter followed by the plant chosen for the portrait. Madame Yevonde’s captions for her Goddesses series frequently listed the husband’s name followed by the particular goddess depicted, thus denying any insight into the identity of the woman portrayed. As a woman’s surname is chiefly passed on either by her father or husband, I wanted to break this patriarchal link by emphasising only first names in my titling.
Flora revels in a knowing playfulness about the projection of feminine identities within the parameters that constitute photography. To consider what it means to make images such as these, fantasies that rupture the everyday, it is apparent that the creation of a ‘mythic’ femininity was, is and always will be, intrinsically unstable. And that embedded within this acknowledgement, there is a longing for cohesion and the recognition of inevitable disappointment.
Flora was funded by the Arts Council England, the 2008 Bradford Fellowship in Photography award by the National Media Museum, England and by the Joy of Giving Something, Inc., New York. A monograph was published by Nazraeli Press in 2011.
[1] Joanna Lowry, ‘Negotiating Power’ in Face On: Photography as Social Exchange. Eds. Mark Durden and Craig Richardson, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000, p. 11-25.
Medium:
C-type hand prints
Dimensions:
Large 40 x 30 inches
Small 16 x 12 inches
Edition Sizes:
Large 9
Small 15