Impression

• Prize
• Photographer
  Kate Jordan, United States

I am an Australian living and working in New York City. My experience of American culture, particularly the breadth and variety contained in NYC, is filtered through the astute eye of an outsider. As a photographer and image maker, I am aware that the diversity I experience daily is not reflected in the visual images that saturate the city’s billboards, screens, magazine and art works.

Impression builds on these concerns and asks, which bodies are shown and which are relegated to invisibility. The project depicts a variety of subjects to challenge the dominant idea of a singular idealized body type that is perpetuated in the history of abstraction in photography. Throughout this history, disproportionate attention is placed on the work of male artists. However, even female artists such as Imogen Cunningham have focused on these ‘flawless’ bodies, which perpetuates the notion of an idealized body in a more insidious way with the coopting of one’s mind, more so than gender, becoming the fundamental issue.

The work combines dramatic studio lighting, motion, and contorted gestures with black and white photography to concentrate on the elemental aspects of texture, shape, contour and tonality. The use of scale transforms the bodies into otherworldly landscapes. This heightened visibility brings those usually relegated to the shadows into the light. Ultimately, this work counters social and cultural forces that define and control expressions of body and body image; the result is a work that functions as a tool for acceptance of self.