Antony Crossfield
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These stereotypes, as I see them, have traditionally emphasised bodily control and stability through physical strength, often embodied in a physique with a firm and impenetrable exterior, often engaged in a display of controlled action. These stereotypes can be seen everywhere in representations of masculinity from Greek sculpture through to images of the modern day body-builder. The figures in my pictures are represented in such a way as to undermine the illusion of control over the body. The bodies are not represented as mastered, organized, or as centres of controlled action. Instead, male figures are conspicuously fleshy, flawed, subject to age and decay, vulnerable and uncertain as to their boundaries and stability.
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'Specimen No.5' 2002. Lambda Print.
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'Specimen No.2' 2002. Lambda Print
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'Foreign Body 3' 2005. Lambda print.
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This results in a kind of fragmentation and incoherence to the body leading to questions over the coherence of the self in relation to the body. The body is no longer the space that secures the idea of self, it is the domain where the self is contested and called into question.
Photography is a particularly appropriate medium for my purposes given its historical associations and recent digital transformation. Photography once appeared to provide us with causally generated �truthful� records of things in the world. It reinforced the Cartesian idea of a disembodied self, capable of attaining certain knowledge from a stable viewpoint. In the digital age this definition of photography has collapsed, yet the belief in the photograph as a faithful record of reality stubbornly persists. I�m interested in exploiting this discrepancy to interrogate conceptions of identity and to challenge photography�s supposed indexical correspondence to the world. In a culture obsessed with lens-based images of the body I want to explore the way digitally manipulated photography affects the way we understand our corporeality. The transformative power of digital photography makes it an ideal medium to investigate another unstable and changeable object- the body.
Taken from several points of view, composed of multiple shots, compressing several instances into a single frame, they are compositions of unified fragments. The images are constructed in a manner closer to the manual labour of painting. Embracing all the diversity and flaws normally erased from the body through digital imaging I aim to trigger a visceral response in the viewer, to engage them physically as well as intellectually.
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'Foreign Body 2' 2005 Lambda print.
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