Artist's Statement: The Alchemy of Intimacy: The Photography of Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD

Abstract

Artist's Statement: The Alchemy of IntimacyThe Photography of Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD Cara J. Alhadeff (bio) I develop my photographic scenarios by finding natural and architectural sites that I juxtapose to human gestures and psychological states. I then choreograph narratives within these environments. Although the photographs are consciously constructed, the relationships are born out of an improvised collaboration in which the physics of touch, gravity, and balance establish an unfolding performance. My photographic performers simultaneously splay their bodies like a smear, echo, trace of memory, and compress themselves into the present moment. The photograph exposes the viewer to what is unfolding in front of the camera; nothing is manipulated during the analogue developing or printing process. Although I am a photographer, I don't see my work as strictly photographic, but as sculptural, performative, cinematic. Collaborating with artists, activists, and scholars from multiple disciplines is critical to my working process. I arrange space, objects, and bodies (including my own) in such a way as to blur the lines that separate them. This luminescent excess inhabits both the domestic and the animalistic. Characters become hybrids of machine and animal that populate dreamlike worlds. The quotidian in relation to the sensual spectacle sets up a ritualistic narrative—a strewn collision of bodies and space is simultaneously purposeful and haphazard. Through a carnal visual language, these polymorphic bodies are engaged in ambiguous ceremonies. I explore the body as a membrane between sensuality and restraint, surrender and resistance. My intention is to disrupt the distinction between the interior and exterior of both psychological and physical experiences. Images illuminate a call and response between anxiety and beauty: anxiety in the moment of recognizing the familiar within the unfamiliar, beauty in the moment of responsiveness to our undeniable connectedness, yet clinging to a separate identification. I explore this web as a [End Page 272] process of multi-layered storytelling in which ambiguity is not a lack of clarity but a multiplicity of clarities. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Self-Spain #4. Analog Color Print, 44 × 44.″ Photograph Shot: 2008, Fundación Valparaiso, Residency, Playa de Mojácar, Spain. The following elliptical stories further expand my photographic scenarios. These include my childhood pilgrimage to Romanesque cathedrals throughout France and Le Museé Picasso, early intimacies as a teenager working on a biological farm and as a beekeeper in the French Pyrenees and Béja, Tunisia, and numerous censorship incidents. 1977. Boulder Imbibing the articulated muscularity of Michelangelo's David coincided with the chaos of my parents' divorce. This collision offered me my first conscious taste of the power of vulnerability, beauty, and the naked human body. As an art historian, my father had an acute appreciation of the nude in art—in particular, the male nude. His preoccupation with developing his own ideal body led us to the university gym. He would frequently take me with him to lift weights. I remember hiding at the age of five in the tall yellow lockers in the men's locker-room—eagerly peeking out to see college students pumping iron, showering, parading around in all their magnificence. Primed by my father's art historical pontifications about the eroticized nobility of the male form, I conflated these sneaker-wearing, muscle-bound, towel-less men with Michelangelo's idealized marble statue of David that I had seen the previous year in Florence. The same year, my artist mother collaborated with Nancy Spanier Dance Theater of Colorado. I can still feel the exhilarating sense of curiosity and awe as two topless female dancers strode majestically across the stage wearing undulating pleated pantaloons and the Egyptian funerary portrait masks that my mother had made for the performance. These Faiyum-like headdresses were mesmerizing portraits of the deceased, like those painted on sarcophagi—a spectacular image of the living soul for the dead to take to the afterlife. The dancers' naked breasts and the sumptuous flow of pantaloons draped around their bodies, floating across the stage with stylized determination and purpose, set in motion an uncanny, raw intensity that continues to influence my vision of gesturing into consciousness, life in constant flux. 1980. Paris I find home the first...