“Nudes / How NOT to photograph women”
The upcycled and hand-made photo collages represent a deliberate blurring of traditional boundaries between gender and species, replaced bzy a celebration of freedom, power, and a quest to uncover the repressed, devalued, and forbidden. These works reject conventional norms of representation, particularly those shaped by patriarchal and fetishistic perspectives in the visual arts.
This is a very pleasing photograph of a beautiful girl.
“The Technique of Nude Photography” was a two-volume manual published in London in the 1950s, which presented women’s bodies through a standardizing, objectifying lens. Accompanied by instructional commentary on how to photograph women and evaluate their “assets” and “defects”, the book epitomizes the male gaze - a fetishizing, paternalistic approach to female representation.
Very few models have a perfect bust.
In an act of rebellion, I disassembled the publication and used its remnants to construct new images, grounded in a personal canon of beauty inspired by mythologies and indigenous belief systems. The resulting collages reflect a process of liberation, dismantling conventional distinctions of gender and species in favor of celebrating wildness, autonomy, and a search for what has been repressed or devalued.
The head was purposely allowed to go into shadow to give emphasis to the rest of the figure.
All colleges were created using upcycled materials - specifically, old books and discarded papers - aligning with my critique of overproduction, waste, and resource overexploitation. This approach positions the work within the broader context of sustainable artistic practice, where the reuse of found materials becomes a critical response to the environmental and socio-economic challenges of contemporary consumer culture.
Most of the work during my four-month stay in Salvador in Bahia, during which I conducted research on religions. During my stay, I regularly attended Candomble ceremonies. I became the daughter of one of the terreiro. Bahia’s spirituality and practices have strongly influenced not only my work, but especially my life.
Technique: handmade collages complemented by painting and drawing techniques.
The series consists of 45 handmade collages in sizes 26 x 17 and 27.5 x 19.2
The project was carried out as part of an art grant from the City of Warsaw. / Projekt został zrealizowany w ramach stypendium artystycznego m.st. Warszawy.
