Medusa was originally a beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," priestess in Athena's temple, but when she was raped, or seduced, by the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon in Athena's temple, the enraged virgin goddess transformed her beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn a man to stone. In Ovid's telling, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Athena as just and well-deserved.
In my serie "Caligynephobia" I show a Medusa, how she could have looked before the conversion.
I picked women with long hair and a slight exotic touch, a type woman, which a majority of the western society characterize as "a beautiful woman". Their charisma shows self-assuredness and independence and is less fragile than an elf-looking type of woman. Men are more carefully and more respectfully with women this personality. The portrayed women should have a warmhearted gaze and a very open pose so all distance from the viewer will be reduced. It should not be salacious or arrogant or just an erotic picture but should be suggestive of calmness and affection. The women are laying on the floor without any makeup and without any splashing postprocessing just like the raw muses in studios of artists since hundreds of years.
Jesco Tscholitsch was born on September 26th in 1973. His mother is an artist, his father a carpenter and his sister a designer of textile. After primary school, he worked as an assistant of James G. Perret and then as an operator at a cinema. He has also worked eight years as an editor of a newspaper.
Now Jesco is tracking his own projects for exhibitions and is working as a photographer for Getty Images in London and for Veer in Berlin. He concentrates on observing the generation of consumption. He lives with his wife Moni and his two daughters Jakobina and Ida in Emmenbruecke, Switzerland.
â??The viewer should see his dreams, dark sides or felicity in my photography. The stories in my pictures are every-day life stories but the protagonists are styled in high gloss. The borders of reality and the dream world are blurred. The reality creates association and identification where the artificial keeps the required distance. In our business life weâ??re looking for reality but in our leisure time we prefer the illusory world. I want to dive into these two worlds and find the tragedy and humor to illustrate it.â??
