Relief
I photograph women whose bodies fall outside the visual canon of fine art photography. The series uses tonal inversion to remove the photographic surface that usually softens or sexualises such bodies. What remains is form: weight, density, anatomy.
These images do not argue that these bodies are beautiful.
They do not argue that these bodies are political. They record what the body is when no argument is being made about it.
The technique is not stylisation. Inversion strips the image of the photographic conventions through which the female body is normally read: softness, contrast, intimacy of skin. In their place: a body seen as relief. A surface with mass.
The series is called RELIEF for two specific reasons. In sculpture, relief is form raised from a flat ground: these images flatten the body and raise it again as graphic mass.
In ordinary speech, relief is the absence of a pressure that was previously there. The pressure these bodies are released from is the pressure to be seen on someone else’s terms.
