Katarzyna Górna – Madonny (1996-2001)

The maturation of Madonna – as an adolescent who has just started her monthly cycle, as Mother Mary with the infant Christ, and finally in a pose reminiscent of the Pietà.

Images via [Kompas Sztuki]

Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob)

Another postcard on my wall.

“Gender ambiguity was central to the recently rediscovered work of Claude Cahun. Born Lucie Schwob, she adopted the more androgynous sounding name Claude Cahun and lived in Paris as part of an openly lesbian couple. She moved in surrealist circles, but never actively promoted herself as either writer or artist: her photographs, for example, were not exhibited in her lifetime. However, shaving her hair off, or wearing various disguises, Cahun used her self-portrait photographs to suggest that all forms of self-representation involved an element of masquerade.” via [Tate Modern]

Wilhelm von Gloeden

I have this as a postcard pinned up on my wall.

Images via [Von Gloeden]

Homoerotic photography by German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden.

Erwin Blumenfeld

Images via [Modernism]

One of the many things I love about Berlin.

Satomi Shirai – Home from Home

“Home from Home is about cramped domestic conditions, where the inhabitants of these mostly tiny places appear and disappear, vanish and seem to even lose their own identity. Often the people shown in Satomi’s pictures can’t be recognized. They are anonymous inhabitants of faceless living spaces and yet one can discover so many reminiscences in her images about national origins, cultural uniqueness and individual personal histories.” via [Artnet]

(Satomi Shirai)

Torsten Warmuth

Images from Belle de nuit, Provocacion and Night Gatherers.

“Torsten Warmuth, 1968, is a German experimental, fine-art photographer who received a degree in Natural Science and a doctorate at the University of Kassel. In 1996, after having worked for a US mathematics software producer he decides to devote himself exclusively to photography. Within his extensive portfolio we find works using the double exposure technique. For most of his images he uses a large format camera. His series Belle de Nuit contains work surrounding Berlin’s nightlife. While making this series he experimented with multiple toning, producing unique works that give the prints a heightened plastic effect which become Silver Paintings. From 2010 onwards, the produced negatives have become more of a raw material that he works on creating pictorial compositions. By hand he creates multi-toned prints on gelatin silver paper.” via [500 Photographers]

(Torsten Warmuth)

Giacomo Sinapsi

(Giacomo Sinapsi)

via [jannike viveka]

Controversial Art – Bill Durgin

Photographs taken from Nudes & Still Lifes and Figure Studies.

I have never seen nudes quite like these before.

On Nudes & Still Lifes:

“Nudes and Still Lifes is a series of photographs that reverberate between the languages of attraction and abjection, painting and performance, photography and sculpture. While specific poses riff on gestures and peripheral details from the works of Lehman, Corbet, Gerome, Belmer, and Bacon, the exquisite distortion of the figures attempts an undoing of recognizable form. For the Nudes images I work with dancers, models, and my own body to choreograph shapes through contortion and perspective. Resisting traditional views of figuration, I reduce the figure into an abstracted form of muscle, fat, and bone. I then compose a Still Life and connect the images through composition and location. I arrange flowers, fruits, vegetables, fish, and meat, delicately intertwined with wig hair traces from the figure to sculpt a Still Life that is both subtly grotesque and elegant.”

On Figure Studies:

“My photographs reflect a fascination with the body as form. The complex figurations, undulating arrangements of flesh, as the body seems to collapse onto it self, image an almost abstracted figure lacking appendages and hair. The physical structure becomes not just a shell, but a moving sculpture of skin, muscle, fat, and bone… I want the bodies to be recognized as bodies, but also to be detached from common perceptions of the figure. Bound within each singular view, the uncanny figures convey the body as both abject and marvelous.“

(Bill Durgin)

via [IGNANT]