1. 2.
The first image I am going to discuss is the black and white image on the left. This photograph was taken by sculpture/ photographer Hans Bellmer the image is from a series of his work called the ‘La poupee’ series which were used in the journal Minotaure (a surrealist puplication). His work is often quoted as being ‘surrealist photography’. Which I find myself coming to agreeing with as his work for me looks and feels very surreal and unnerving. The bodies he creates from doll parts and makes himself remind me very much of work by dali .
For example in this Dali painting the way the human form is very twisted and miss shaped. To create instead of a romanticized image of a beautiful body it gives a more weirder and vulgar image, What Dali lacks where Bellmer succeeds is where as Dali uses lots of bright colour’s which although give a very real surreal affect, Bellmers are very real and taken by camera and give more of an unnerving, chilling feel to them which isn’t exactly an emotion I have felt when looking at a Dali piece. Although there is a different feel with Dali’s And Ballmer’s work the surreal elements are all to similar. For example Female beauty and the sexualization of the youthful form are two key elements key to both artists but more so with Ballmer as Dali is of course a lot broader.
The second image is by yet another photographer called Cindy Sherman. Her image uses a doll like the first one with a made up femine beauty, very similar to that which you see in the fashion industry with bright lips and neat eye make up. The model also has a large cut taken out of her chest where another female face lay, Almost looking as if were waiting. The model woman also has a back drop of a beautiful silk sheet which is a good balance of colour with the rest of the colours in the image but also shows some form of wealth, whether it being hers or the photographer or industry taking it’s wealth I do not know but would probably show the industries wealth not hers. The "model's" excessive makeup, hair in wild disarray, and bruised "flesh” are all related to controversy in the 70’s over the sex-and-violence– saturated fashion photography. The figure is also as I mentioned early complicated by a hollowed chest in which another vacant representation of the painted female face resides, Ready to destroy this body and create another person who will go on and destroy her body and so on. Almost as if the face inside the body is influenced by the person she is in, like a roll model and when she breaks out and becomes her own model she is yet to be battered and destroyed and another girl with high hopes and dreams will idolize her and go on to do the same as she did. Almost like a violent circle.
Qualities yet again with this image depict very surreal imagery yet again I feel, also the use of dolls is a very surreal object in itself as it creates this element of surrealism about it straight away, if both the pictures by bellmer and Sherman were people it would have a totally different feel. Both share very up in your face straight away unnerving feelings of death and mysteriousness. This in both wouldn’t be as strong without the fake yet almost life like forms created by dolls. Both images share views on the female body but what’s interesting with the two images I picked is we have both sexes representing the female body.
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