Jennifer Zwick photography - Constructed Narrative and Anonymous Animals series
I am loving Jennifer Zwick’s photography. One of my new all-time favourite photographs is The Reader, 2005, from her Constructed Narrative series. Check out a larger version on her homepage.
and, detail:
It’s hard for me to explain why I love the photograph as much as I do. I think it reminds me of my childhood. I was an avid and hungry reader, and especially loved the library - visiting the library and finding new books to discover was a really exciting experience for me. I like the use of colour in this work, the sense of humour, the feeling of imagination somehow captured.
Artist statement found on her official site:
My constructed-narrative photographs are nonlinear short stories. They focus on bizarrely adventurous young girls populating beautiful but uneasy worlds. To create these images, I draw from childhood fantasies and memories, then construct life-sized environments. By pushing these scenarios to an extreme conclusion, the girls become metaphors for our hyper-real childhood selves, where remembered emotions become stronger through time
(Another interesting work from the same series is The Explorers, complete with a behind-the-scenes blog documenting the process of its set-up and construction.)
Jennifer Swick also created a really fascinating series: Anonymous Animals from 2004, altered found photographs.
The very act of masking someone’s identity, making them anonymous, necessitates that they have an individual identity to begin with. Eyes are often seen as “windows to the soul.” Aren’t photographs like these associated with victims of a crime or trauma of some kind? There is something disturbing about the covering of the eyes of these animals - without their eyes they do seem objectified, somehow inanimate. By constructing photographic portraits in which an inanimate, anonymous animal is seemingly victimized by the camera (or some other unknown experience) - Swick seem to assert their life, value and sentience. When she photographs animals who are in action - barking or in seeming movement, a different effect is created. There is a lot to unpack and write about with this work, I find it very successful and interesting.
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