February 9th, 2009

I’ve been spending too much time appreciating photography, part 1

New York-based photographer Alison Brady creates images that are mysterious and sometimes overtly violent. Her mostly female subjects look like victims of the  beauty ideal, but whether they’ve sacrificed themselves at the altar of pop culture’s idolization of feminine perfection or if they’ve been been attacked through the result of their own vanity is unclear.

Her photographs all have a totally unnerving context of stillness: there was violence, there is about to be violence, but each time we are in the eye of the storm. The effects and impact are obvious, but help isn’t yet on the way… or perhaps never will be.

Like Hitchcock, Brady understands that the greatest fear lies in the subtle unseen. That the human imagination, given a hint, will conjure storylines far more disturbing than any picture can capture. In many of her images we only see the legs, dangling, prostrate, filthy. The upper half, the face, the expression, is hidden: in sand, in the ceiling, in the refrigerator. What has happened or how they’ve come to lie there is unknown to us. That visual curiosity, that we’re seeing the conclusion but never the beginning, is the most disturbingly eerie half-knowledge of all.

Shape and Color (via Stokingtheroots)