This collection of color
photographs of women is distinctive and striking.  The women are beautiful
fashion models, and they appear nude or topless, so the book is in the genre of
classy glamour photography.  By the standards of this genre, it one of the more
creative projects. Mario Schmolka’s images have a strongly artificial feel to
them, taken in studios in cold lights.  As Tyra Banks likes to say on America’s
Top Model, the subjects look fierce, and often they have lots of heavy eye
makeup.  Many of the pictures are a little bizarre or disturbing.  Some use
double exposures, have added post-production distortions, are so dark as to be
hard to see clearly, have wooden-looking models, or have models in awkward
poses.  Often they are in studios with blank backgrounds, sitting on a table or
on the floor, or in some sequences, the model is posed against an industrial
background.  They generally wear stereotypically feminine clothing, but subvert
or distort the gentleness that is generally associated with it.  One model has
brown dirt smeared on her face and chest, and wears a woolly hat tied under her
chin.  Another wears a ribbed skirt, but stands with her legs crossed, her
hands angrily on her hips, and her eyes in darkness.  One very skinny model
wears just a necklace, with slicked back wet hair, and deep red lipstick.  She
looks childlike, but also uncooperative with her shoulders hunched forwards,
and her eyes suspicious.  The clothing, hairstyles, and gestures are unusual
throughout the book, and this makes it much more interesting than most such
photography.  Schmolka plays with ideas of voyeurism, objectification,
femininity, and even beauty.  While there’s nothing particularly political or
politically subversive about these images, they are at least aesthetically adventurous
and memorable. 

Link: http://www.marioschmolka.com/

© 2006 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews.  His main
research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: ArtAndPhotography