Phenotype

“Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth” Picasso. Phenotype is an ongoing progression in my working practise that seeks to explore how the human body is positioned within contemporary culture, while being reflected to us via new imaging technologies that call in to question ideas of authenticity. Modern photo editing technologies have provided visual culture with a constant stream of what might be termed “ perfect bodies”, perhaps to the detriment of our perceptions of ourselves and how we could possible live up to these idealised forms. There is an increasing trend for people to physically alter themselves via surgery to enable them to conform more closely to cultural norms. There is also an increasing trend of people using surgery to “re-edit” their genders, even creating new ones. Using their bodies as their own artworks reflecting their deepest heart felt and psychological identities. These brave pioneers are raising important questions of tolerance, identity and, fundamentally, what it means to be human and what sort of culture is it that we wish to create! The project is a series of naked, raw portraits of imagined genders. The source material for these images is culled from my own archive of naked portraits that where generated for a previous project, “Closer to God.” Much in the same way that advertising studios use image libraries of perfect hands, legs, feet, and other anonymous body parts to enhance via Photoshop the subjects of their campaigns, I am using this my own archive to imaging new genders, new un-idealised bodies that question how our bodies reflect culture and possibly our own humanity. I have purposely celebrated the marks left on these bodies by their journey through life, mixing together peoples personal fleshy histories to form a universal narrative of our condition. The identities of the subjects are deliberately obscured to allow their stories to be told via their bodies and perhaps for us to be able to project ours selves onto them. These images seek to recycle and contemporise representations of gender and gender specific identity and hopefully forge new public debate. The project is all about honouring individuals marginalized and erased by dominant social/cultural values, [which are provincial at the best of times]. The photographs consciously reference the iconic stables of figurative representation from art history, thus contradicting every authoritarian with no imagination that has ever insisted upon a standard shape for the human in art; contradicting 2000 years of creative misrepresentation of what being human means. Personally I have suffered from chronic psoriasis all my adult life, and it is perhaps this that has driven me, as an artist, to question the representation of the body, of its beauty in contemporary art and modern culture. We cannot change the fact that we can be defined by how we look, but perhaps we can change these definitions. As an artist I have spent the last ten years using photography to raise issues about the body. My project, Closer to God has been widely published and is housed in the permanent collection of the Belgrade Museum of Art, Serbia, and also in private collections in the UK. I have both a Masters and BA honours degree in photography. Please visit my website for further information: www.tobiasslaterhunt.co.uk