Model Study 3 2008

Curator: Elina Brotherus's "Model Study 3," a C-print photograph from 2008, confronts us with a figure bathed in light. It has such a casual domestic feel. Editor: It feels almost unsettlingly bright, doesn’t it? Like staring into the sun. The starkness of the light slices the figure into zones and flattens her dimensionality almost like in a Byzantine mosaic, where the soul triumphs over corporeal existence. Curator: Hmm, mosaic, interesting. For me it feels so quiet, a captured moment. The woman, seen from behind, she is sort of anonymous. A study indeed... what does she represent, the subject or the object? The way she holds the cable feels strangely assertive to me though. Editor: Assertive yes, because the cord, as thin as it is, represents her power—literally the source of life of the scene, electricity, current… Brotherus seems to evoke a reversal. Woman usually is presented as the aesthetic object. The picture makes me think of classical odalisques, painted with such assumed dominance. This composition in contrast questions the gaze and the objectification it usually carries. Curator: You are right, it flips the idea. It really triggers you to ask those big questions about viewing and being viewed. Do you think the slightly blurry quality affects the feel too? Editor: Definitely. The slight blurriness gives it a dreamy quality, distancing us further. As if memory itself is veiled. Blur here may be the admission that clarity, like a truthful representation, is, ultimately, unattainable and photography is nothing but illusion. Curator: I am convinced that photography is indeed an illusion, and it becomes a potent device with this image to really expose what matters about the viewer’s implication in the scene and to reveal the construction behind that photographic ‘truth’. I’m drawn to the composition itself and the quiet sense of drama. Editor: It has that perfect sense of the unresolved… or perhaps irresolvable. Yes. An alluring image, both calming and provocative. Curator: Provocatively insightful, and deeply calm and beautiful. That will be the end of our tour!