Photo: Vegetation, Simryn Gill, 1999.
Kate Day left her camera at home, instead capturing this fascinating exhibition in her mind's eye.
After Image, at the Fruitmarket Gallery until September 27, unites four female photographers who've stepped in front of the lens to question ideas of cultural, political, social and personal identity.
By using props, masks, disguise and location these women have explored the way they look and are looked at.
Cindy Sherman is perhaps the most renowned for this. Her Untitled Film Still # 47a (1979) depicts a blonde starlet as if seen on the big screen. She wears full make-up, huge dark glasses and a large brimmed hat; the setting is a typically suburban American garden.
This starlet is, of course, a disguised Sherman who has manipulated the familiar visual impact of film to persuade her viewer to see at first not Sherman but the starlet who, with closer inspection, becomes recognisable as Sherman.
Photo: Untitled #222, Cindy Sherman, 1990. Courtesy Sammlung Goetz.
Untitled # 322 (1996), in which Sherman again manipulates her own image with a mask, has a freakish, theatrical theme falling between the grotesque and a sort of sad innocence.
Elsewhere Sherman takes on the style of an Old Master painting. She attempts to re-own the female form both by mimicking a style and altering a natural appearance with prosthetic breasts and heavily applied make-up.
There is a definite intention to play with the idea of the real and the un-real.
The theme of masks and disguises continues with Ana Mendieta’s entertaining photographic record of a performance piece, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) March – April 1972/1997), showing a male friend's facial hair being transferred onto her face.
The application of the hair as a disguise is apparently undermined by the process being visible to all. There is no intrigue or desire to fool. Mendieta appears to ask her viewer to consider his or her preconceptions of female and male identity.
Photo: Providence, RI, Francesca Woodman, 1975-78. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman.
In Francesca Woodman’s collection of photographs her body is not made so readily available for speculation and her statement is much less brash.
In one image (from the Italy 1977-78 series), in which Woodman stands by a wall and shields her body with strips of torn wallpaper, she seems to merge her with her run-down surroundings.
She offers the viewer contradictory responses, relying on a perverse curiosity (accentuated by her choice of sexual dress and sensual fabrics particularly in the New York 1979-80 series) combined with a desire to leave this unwilling subject alone.
Her suicide at the age of 22 perhaps offers an explanation for the conflict between a desire to disappear and to seek attention.
Woodman chose to put herself in front of the camera but seems to hide from the lens.
Photo: Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), Ana Mendieta, March-April 1972/1997.
Simryn Gill’s Dalam (2001) also explores questions of identity through absence. A series of 258 photographs clinically records the interiors of numerous Malaysian homes. In none of them is an inhabitant present - although the flotsam and jetsam of a normal family home most definitely is.
The living room may be seen here as a cultural and social mask for its inhabitants. It's the space into which others are welcomed on our own terms and onto which we project a portrayal of ourselves. Tellingly, the term Dalam, in Malay, can mean ‘inside’, ‘interior’ or ‘deep’.
Brought up in Malaysia, Gill seems to be searching endlessly through stranger’s living rooms for the very essence of what she is, where she has come from and where she is going. It is almost an attempt to skim some sort of cultural identity from an epic collection of information.
Gill’s Vegetation (1999) series uses a different visual language to ask similar questions.
Hiding behind indigenous vegetation, she presents herself as an unassuming part of the existing plant life. It is as though she seeks to somehow take root in her homeland.
