The (ab)Use of Beauty (2022) - Chapter One
Visually situated in the French Alps, The (ab)Use of Beauty is a personal testimony of life in the mountains, while critically examining the desire for beauty in life, the use of applied aesthetics in photography, and the medium’s limited representation of reality.
In this work, consisting of image and text, both - registration and analysis - are indispensable to one another. Approaching the essayistic text as The Missing Image, it’s content serves as a mediator between ‘the image’ and ‘the real’, addressing the image’s limited representation of reality, the image-maker’s responsibility in terms of representation and questioning the romanticized translation of reality we often attribute to the photographic medium. The (ab)Use of Beauty is the first chapter of a photo-text book in creation.
Installation view at Zebrastraat, Ghent. Seven printed and framed photographs of different sizes (120x60cm - 70x40cm - 15x30cm), white textile, metal, text, video projection (20min), voice recording (20min). With the support of BREEDBEELD.