The Bathers - Rilegato

3,67

6 valutazioni di Goodreads

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0822346230 ISBN 13: 9780822346234

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2009

Jennette Williams's platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul take us inside spaces intimate and public, austere and sensuous, filled with water, steam, tile, stone, ethereal sunlight, and earthly flesh. Over a period of eight years, Williams, who is based in New York City, traveled to Hungary and Turkey to photograph, without sentimentality or objectification, women daring enough to stand naked before her camera. Young and old, the women of The Bathers inhabit and display their bodies with comfort and ease - floating, showering, conversing, lost in reverie.
To create the images in The Bathers, Williams drew on gestures and poses found in iconic paintings of nude women, including tableaux of bathers by Paul Cezanne and Auguste Renoir, renderings of Venus by Giorgione and Titian, Dominique Ingres's Odalisque and Slave, and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. By alluding to these images and others, Williams sought to reflect the religious and mythological associations of water with birth and rebirth, comfort and healing, purification and blessing. She also used copies of the paintings to communicate with her Hungarian- and Turkish-speaking subjects - homemakers, factory workers, saleswomen, secretaries, managers, teachers, and students.
Working in steam-filled environments, Williams created quiet, dignified images that evoke not only canonical representations of female nudes but also early pictorial photography. At the same time, they raise contemporary questions about the gaze, the definition of documentary photography, and the representation and perception of beauty and femininity, particularly as they relate to the aging body. Above all else, her photos are sensuously evocative. They invite the viewer to feel the steam, hear the murmur of conversation, and reflect on the allure of the female form.

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Recensione:

"Jennette Williams's photographs of women bathing portray the female form, but they transcend simple representation to speak powerfully about women's own private sense of identity and beauty. It doesn't matter that these bodies are not conventionally ideal when these women are in front of Jennette's camera, they are proud to reveal their full femininity... Jennette is both an excellent documentary photographer and a superb portraitist, a rare combination... As in Ingres's The Turkish Bath, Jennette's lounging women not only revel in intimate feminine moments but in the camaraderie of women as well. They relax together, soaking in the steamy atmosphere. These hauntingly beautiful and iconic images of women are captured in extraordinary, magical spaces enhanced by wonderful light." --Mary Ellen Mark, from the foreword

L'autore:

Jennette Williams is a photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

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