My Father's Legs
In the photographic representation we identify older, found family archive photos and original new contemporary photos, portraying interrelations between time, motif and context. Evolving around the found family photos of my father playing tennis, the new photos repeat, i.e. in a directorial setting of sorts, re-enact and reproduce the leg position of the older photographic model, creating visual correlations between the past and the present. In a clash between the old and the new, between archive image, memory and a recent scene, photography frames the central male legs motif as a scene repeating in a series of repetitions and variations and, aside from photography, it manifests itself in different media, such as an artist’s book browsed as a flip-book or a video of the piece in which animation and editing particularly highlight motion and repetition. My photographic exploration creates visual parallels in which I juxtaposes my father’s found photos and contemporary artistic photos of my partner, overturning thus the dominant convention of subject-object relationship, the observer vs. the observed, the watching regime convention in which the gaze is traditionally perceived as the male subject and the female body is considered the object. In the photographs this norm is destabilised playing with codes and conventions of representation, humour and casualness point to the objectification of the male body before the female gaze.












