On the face of it these gritty, hyper-real #harshbeautiful portraits appear to fly in the face of airbrushing trickery and cosmetic industry self-loathing. They scrutinize each sitter with an unflinching gaze, and in return the sitter reveals the scars of their life unashamedly etched across their features in forensic detail. Surely this represents the ultimate #nofilter #selfactualising moment in which each courageously bears their soul to the camera?!
Yet the portraits in this series are also painstakingly contrived. The shots have been subject to their own mode of “cosmetic surgery” by being heavily worked on in post-production for days on end.
On the one hand these images have been subjected to the refined sensibilities of formal portrait painting, in which the sitter was show with fine features that came to signify his connoisseurial taste in – and therefore entitlement to – the trappings of wealth, rank and privilege. At the same time these #harshbeautiful portraits also revel in the sitters’ open pores and dishevelled whiskers, and celebrate their imperfections with a gleefulness usually reserved for the down-market earthy characters who populate historic genre paintings.
The expression of each bare-shouldered sitter appears to resonate with uncertainty, doubt, restlessness and world-weariness. Their images seem to portray a tender intimacy – a resilience, ruggedness, and a new-found robustness that comes from surviving life’s crises. Yet with their off-kilter colour palette and otherworldly chiaroscuro, the characters represented in these portraits are as far removed from their original selves as chroma key movie action heroes. #thisisSparta!!!!
