Description
“Perfect beauty in all things living and inanimate is revered by our society. Once that beauty ages and is damaged, its embodiment becomes devalued and often is discarded.” With these words photographer Rebecca Martinez introduces her Wounded series, an exhibition of digitally enhanced photographs being shown in the “Beauty Challenged” exhibition at the Robert Tat Gallery.All of Martinez’s work explores her long-standing interest in the effects of time on the fleeting standards of beauty. Trained as both a graphic designer and painter before becoming a photographer, she is attracted to the wide range of possibilities that open up when photography and painting are combined.
For the Wounded series the artist has photographed vintage mannequins, representing an idealized, unobtainable, youthful perfection. Except her mannequins are all damaged, “wounded” by usage and decay and thus no longer perfect. As she describes them, “I photograph mannequins after they have become individuals. As they become ‘flawed’ and reflect their experiences, they more truly represent us.”
Martinez then enhances her photographs, sometimes by intensifying color or perhaps blurring the image. “I see things in a painterly way,” she explains, “so intensifying the color helps me show others how I see. The blurring reflects time and how everything disappears and gets less distinct.” The images often become skewed and off-kilter, creating a disturbing effect. “In these photographs,” she continues, “I interpret our reactions to our own aging, varying from profound sadness and isolation to acceptance, bravery and stoicism, to attempts to repair and arrest the effects of time.”
As Martinez enhances her images, she chooses what she wants people to focus on, what she thinks is important and what the photograph is about. The result, being shown in the “Beauty Challenged” exhibition, is a group of surreal images that are at once both disturbing and beautiful.
Martinez relates an interesting story about the creation of the series: Looking for mannequins to photograph, she went hunting on eBay, where she repeatedly lost out to the same eager bidder. Finally, she contacted the winning bidder and discovered it was the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City, purchasing for their vintage mannequin collection. Martinez contacted them and explained her project, hoping to convince them to let her borrow mannequins to be photographed. When David Hoey, Bergdorf’s Senior Director of Visual Merchandising, saw Martinez’s photographs he was so impressed that they forged a working relationship and now an exhibition in Bergdorf Goodman’s Fifth Avenue store gallery is being planned.
Also on view in the “Beauty Challenged” exhibition at Robert Tat Gallery are selected photographs from other series in Rebecca Martinez’s 12 years of work. All are examples of her uncanny ability to find and capture the odd view or object, manipulate and enhance the image, and show us something we have not seen or felt before.
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