The Pro-ana community has turned anorexia (Ana) into a dogma. They venerate the illness giving meaning to their totalitarian “lifestyle”. It’s a virtual reality where they state commandments, share motivating tricks and exchange hundreds of images of thin models via their blogs. They have created Thinspiration, a visual new language – obsessively consumed to keep on wrestling with the scales day after day. Now, they have evolved ,interacting with their cameras portraying their bony clavicles or flat bellies; consuming extreme anorexic images. I re-take their self-portraits, photographing and reinterpreting their images from the screen, resulting from the visual response of the bond between obsession and self-destruction; the disappearance of one’s own identity. The project is a personal and introspective journey across the nature of obsessive desire and the limits of auto-destruction, denouncing disease’s new risk factors: social networks and photography.
Laia Abril (1986) is a documentary photographer raised in Barcelona. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and studied photography through different workshops and master classes, including at the ICP in New York City. She began working on documentary projects in the Balkans, covering the events such as the Funeral in Srebrenica and the Independence of Kosovo, first for a Spanish NGO and then for Spanish newspapers. At the same time she was combining photography with her communication career as the Press Coordinator for the exhibition ‘World Press Photo 08’ in Barcelona. Her work has been exhibited and appraised mostly in Italy, Spain and London. In 2010 she joined the agency Reportage by Getty as an emerging talent and participated as an emergent photographer at Plat(t)form PhotoMuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. Her last multimedia ‘A Bad Day’ has been shown at the New York Photo Festival 2011, 3rd Lumix PhotoFestival in Hanover, 2012 Sarajevo Winter Festival among many others and recently she has been called to participate at the Ojo de Pez PhotoMeeting in Barcelona. Her photography tells intimate stories and raises uneasy realities related with femininity in modern times. She uses them to convey a subtle message, an insider warm approach to her subjects and combines strict photography with other multimedia tools as video and design. For the last two years she has being working on a long-term project about eating disorders that opens a new aesthetical and brave path in her ways of approaching the disease, avoiding stereotypes .
Fanzine Thinspiration :
25€ Worldwide
22€ Europe
http://www.laiaabril.com/project/thinspiration/
