Isa Marcelli began posting pictures taken with her Canon APN on Flickr, always searching for different aesthetic results. “The Internet helped me greatly. It’s one of the best things about being active today.”
She soon realized that she wasn’t looking at recreating reality, but to provide a new way to see it, thereby escaping a certain materiality. Marcelli found old cameras at flea markets and online and equipped them with plastic filters.
An admirer of the work of Sally Mann and Mark Sink, Marcelli says that the latter gave her, “a true aesthetic shock.” She got in touch with him, and he responded with a long mail and gave Marcelli her first camera. It was at that moment that she began to work with collodion, an orthochromatic process that is both highly technical and leaves much to chance. Marcelli had to learn the chemistry behind it “With collodion, the colors aren’t transcribed in the same way. The collodion gives them a metallic tint, shifting reality. The mistakes in the photographs give them a sense of drama. I like that you can’t tie my pictures to a certain time period. I prefer timelessness. It makes the work more universal, more essential. The process is no longer as rare as it once was. I love the process, but it’s gnawing away at me.”
Marcelli photographs her friends and family, whom she calls, “extensions of [her]self.” They serve as the models for her compositions and photographic tableaux, which fall somewhere between pictorial representation and the immediacy of the situation.
Although she prefers somewhat masculine clothing, Marcelli explores femininity in her photographs. “There is an image of the feminine that I am more willing to display in my photographs than on myself.”
Samantha Rouault
Read the full article on the French version of Le Journal.
Isa Marcelli will exhibit her work beginning March 8, 2013, at the Galerie Johanna Breede in Berlin, as part of a group exhibition entitled Frauen. The opening will be held on International Women’s Day. Her work can also be seen at the Galerie Unlimited Grain in Rotterdam, starting March 23, 2013.
