I always had this fear that I will one day come across a dead body. This fear would usually manifest while outside of the city. It would come on particularly strong around bodies (!) of water. My fear wasn’t a fear entirely – there was a hint of excitement there. Sometimes, I’d look especially closely where there were any rock piles, nooks, thick bushes. A foot. A hand. A head. I could almost see them. It’s not that I wanted to come across a dead body… but I maybe I did.
I read a lot of true-crime books when I was younger. Even as a child, I used to sneak into my grandmother’s room and read her issues of Detektyw (detective) – this was a Polish magazine that specialized in features about crime, usually homicides. The writers didn’t skim on details. In those stories people would come across barrels full of body parts, baby corpses in the closet, fresh graves, torsos in the trunk the way you and I would sometimes get caught in the rain: not every day, of course, but eventually. So I guess in the back of my mind I always thought that it was perfectly feasible to go to a beach and stumble upon a femur, for example.
I watched the movie “Blow Up” where a photographer takes a picture of a scene in a park and upon developing one of the photos in the darkroom notices a curious shape in the bushes. He blows up the photograph and discovers that the shape is most likely a body and there’s somebody with a gun lurking in the background. The photographer goes back to the park, finds the body but gets startled and leaves. At home, he discovers his prints gone. Except for the blow up of the body.
I loved this movie as it examined beautifully the wavering line that keeps reality and fantasy apart. In the last scene of the movie the photographer participates in a mime performance of playing tennis. There’s no tennis ball. But he can hear it bounce back and forth in his head.
My essay was inspired by the movie and my own morbid hang-ups. The photographs should be viewed in sequence 1 to 7 with the first photograph (Lady June) serving as a way to introduce the viewer to the idea of the body being contained somewhere in the whole image. The last photograph throws the theme right in the viewer’s face.
The world is used to a female nude being photographed in the context that is usually sexual. I used a nude female model because of the larger project that I’m working on where I explore the idea of nude female body in situations that aren’t sexual. My nudes are troubled, defiant, funny and sad. They are certainly models of female sensuality as well but that’s their secondary characteristic.
Blow-Up was shot in Nova Scotia in 2010.
project-eye | Contributor
Project-eye is a photographer based in Canada. She photographs things that she sees in reality as well as what she sees in her head. She feels inspired all of the time and sometimes wishes the muses would give her a little break so that she’d have time to learn how to cook.
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