Phebe Schmidt is a Melbourne-based photographer who creates hyperreal images, often portraits, which are tightly constructed but essentially ambiguous. Her work has a stylized plasticity and bright surface that acts as a mask that plays with ideas of self, theatrical role-playing, and what lies beneath. Plasticity is a key term Schmidt uses to describe her work and marks a contemporary obsession with homogenised, generic beauty ideals that conform to gender, social, and cultural norms. As part of this approach Schmidt treats subject’s like an object—product, as if positioned and conceptualised for an advertisement to illustrate and foreground how the body is treated as a commodity.
