The photographs of Nude Reagan are discordant and grotesque, portraying changing bodies beneath the endless repetition of one mask.
For John Brian King’s most recent series, he photographed twenty-three nude models with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 camera in an empty Palm Springs office. Each model wore the same Ronald Reagan mask, striking any pose she liked.
Deliberately unsettling, these photographs depict Reagan as a demon and specter haunting the modern world. Evoking the dead conservative president, the models wear the hideous dark-eyed mask – anemic and wrinkled – and morph into unerotic, freakish wraiths. The colors of the photographs accentuate these figures’ eerie qualities: the camera’s unstable flash turns the bland office backdrop alternately into a mold green, a muddy gray, a brilliant white, or a dense, all-encompassing black setting. The women’s shadows are sometimes starkly present, and at other times disappear.
BOOK
Nude Reagan
John Brian King
hardcover, 20 cm x 20 cm, 112 pages (107 color photographs)
Limited edition of 1,000 copies
$40.00
Available June 2016, from http://spurleditions.com
