Almudena Romero / Fissazioni

My first approach to photography was the execution of nude portraits. This was predominantly due to my work in a studio where there was a high demand for such images. Despite the fact that our clients came from many different backgrounds they all desired the construction of an image of themselves through photography, and this image was a reflection of the dominant aesthetic discourse promoted by cinema, painting, photography , and generally speaking, visual arts.

The fact that our customers accepted the alienation of their bodies, as far as their image corresponded to a model representation, led me to question the reasons that encouraged our customers to undertake this approach and thereby to wonder about the conception and understanding that we have of our body.

Since then I started a visual research to investigate across different media (photography, video, animation, sculpture) as to how we understand our bodies and how visual arts participate in the creation of this understanding.

There has always been a dominant discourse in visual arts when representing the reality of a time period. In this sense, the representation of a naked body in painting, sculpture, photography, and through other media has depended on the ideology, values, moral and religion of the time period and location. Luigi Pirandello called these conceptions of our reality and existence, Fissazioni (Fixations). The normative frame that establishes the significance of the objects, including our body, is just a compound of temporal fixations, which determines but also gets determined by visual arts. Indeed, visual arts help to divulge and implant a normative scene which means a reduction of perspectives in the ways of conceiving and representing the body.

This photo series wonders about the current fixations introducing the naked body in an uncommon semantic space. Neither the models nor their surroundings belong to a dominant aesthetic. In addition the photographs do not follow a formal norm.

Courtesy of the artist ©Almudena Romero

www.almudenaromero.com

Posted by Francesca Marcaccio