“I don’t think there is anyone working right now in photography who has the same youthful seductive energy, the same mix of spontaneity and aesthetic rigor”
New York Times T Magazine, Sally Singer
In 2009 and 2010 Bird shot two weeks in an artists’ community in Tennessee called Sassafras. The result is Rewilding. The last book of Cass Bird of black-and-white and color photographs that will be released later this month by Damiani Editore.
The book’s focus is modern femininity, a sly celebration and investigation of femininity and identity. The grace of her images plays with an idyllic and naturalist mise en scène where emerges a sort of private collaborative energy between the subject and herself.
The girls shooted are not conventionally feminine or “pretty” in the sense of a fashion advertisement, they are androgynous. In some way her photographs reflect the way the world is right now, a mix of spontaneity and aesthetic . She alternates images of beautiful ambigous bodies with landscapes to create a narrative and visual dialogue between human and nature, dynamism and quiet spaces.
These figures are not just androgynous bodies in nature but they are like a symbols, like a gender that signify differently out of contexts. It means to be wild again, a return to nature: Rewilding. It’s possible to find the “gender” not just in the bodies but in the spaces, in the clothing, in the images between color and grainy black and white Cass Bird works in an easy way with her ‘models’, that’s a mixte of seductive energy and spontaneity, her interest is always about people.
Emiliana Tedesco
Rewilding
Cass Bird
Damiani Editors, 2012
ISBN 978 88 6208 218 1
