Sensual Fine Art Photographic Print of a Mans Hand Over Her Mouth
The Body and Its Image: Janice Guy past Matthew J. Abrams
The revealing/concealing nature of self-portraiture.
Notice MFA Programs in Fine art and Writing
Courtesy Hunters Point Press.
Roughly halfway through Janice Guy's new monograph—a sumptuously produced "sequence of thirty-one photographs" published by Barney Kulok and Hunters Point Press—we discover the young artist lying on her back. Seemingly exterior on a brilliant day, Guy holds her photographic camera aloft and points the lens at her confront. More than a fun analog selfie, Guy places her new Minolta 35mm between herself and the sun so that the camera'due south shadow splashes across her confront, deftly splaying her fingers so that her airtight optics remain unshaded. The consequence is hit, masklike—a subtle commentary on the revealing/concealing nature of self-portraiture, and even the shadow-similar or "indexical" nature of photography itself.
Janice Guy, Untitled, 1977. Not printed.
Janice Guyis replete with smart images such every bit this, all of which are innovative cocky-portraits of Guy and her camera. Sometimes we see the Minolta'southward shadow and Guy'south unadorned body—a youthful, sexy, and self-possessed form. But mostly we come across Guy posed with her photographic camera in hand, capturing her reflection in a variety of mirrors. Her cocky-reflexive portraiture practice, which was all only forgotten until recently, has led many viewers to note a certain "Bauhaus" quality to her work, and it's easy to see why. After all, it was the Bauhaus instructor, Umbo, who first made famous the camera-between-confront-and-sun selfie. More than significantly, i can barely examine Guy's meditative mirror portraits without recalling Florence Henri'south ain smoldering self-portrait-with-mirror. The connection seems even more than obvious because Guy studied photography at the famed Düsseldorf Kunstakademie aslope swain students like Thomas Struth and instructors Bernd and Hilla Becher. The teaching of photography in 1970s Federal republic of germany would take no doubt cued itself to its Bauhaus elders, and Guy's photographs practice seem tinged with the great WeimarMeisterin. At the same time, information technology would be a mistake to label these images as derivative. Rather, there are important shifts hither—fissures, really—that make Guy'southward project distinctive, and more relevant to her own moment of creation, which spanned 1975 to 1981.
One could even say that fissures, or fractures, are central to Guy's torso of piece of work. In one of her most startling photographs, two overlapping mirrors splice Guy's body, doubling her and halving her at the same time. In another of my favorites, Guy disrupts the traditional orientation of such shots by standing atop a ladder and shooting into a mirror on the floor. Much of this practice becomes dialogical—a conversation between Guy'southward body and the image of Guy's torso, doubly complicated by the nature of photography, which captures an index of both and thus threatens to equalize the physical with the optical. Some other very smart photograph that seems directly to call up Henri'due south famous mirror shot displays Guy with her camera and what appears to be her profile reflected in another mirror behind her head. But this is, in fact, a photo of Guy's profile made at such an angle as to announced similar her slightly tilted reflection. This is perhaps the well-nigh nuanced paradigm of all, and when yous finally realize that you're viewing a mirror's reflection of a hanging print and non a mirror's reflection of a hanging mirror, your cognitive reasoning recoils in confusion. It's difficult for a photograph to induce that, and do so in such a sangfroid way. This sense of fracturing extends into Guy's hand-tinted photographs as well, which innovate a nearly-campy element into otherwise provocative, if not risqué, images. The tinting doesn't just color the photographs; it signal-jams Guy'due south sexuality, or the ability for the viewer to objectify her body with perfect ease.
Janice Guy, Untitled, 1980. Not printed.
Edited by Kulok and Justine Kurland with an introduction by Kurland and an essay by Struth, Janice Guy is the kind of photographic monograph for which the artworld thirsts. Hunters Point Press's privileging of the perfect, large-scale printing of three dozen photographs over the mediocre, smaller-scale printing of, say, 1 hundred photographs has unintended consequences. Across the sense of luxury, one is left to dwell longer on each page; each photo, by dint of its scarcity, is given a much greater currency. And considering such a strategy implies that each photograph is worth so much time, the pattern only works when the photographs are stiff enough to handle such an observational weight. Luckily, Guy's early works effortlessly carry the load.
Janice Guy is published by Hunters Point Press. A related exhibition of Guy'south photography,Janice Guy: A Pes in the Oral fissure of Art, 1975–1981, is on view at Higher Pictures in New York City until March 9.
Matthew J. Abrams is a writer living in New York. He was a 2016 nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and he holds a PhD from Yale in art history. His work appears regularly in magazines, monographs, journals, and exhibition catalogues, and he runs an experimental art-criticism project on Instagram.
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Source: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/the-body-and-its-image-janice-guy/
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