Tag: paula aparicio

Paula Aparicio – Inés en casa, buenos aires, Diciembre (2017)

Aparicio is a fantastic photographer and image maker. (The above is digital; but she also works in analog.)

I’ve been working out how to tell you something about this for several days now. It’s not easy–not for lack of things to say but in the saying of something there is all too often an effort to demystify. Aparicio’s work resists that approach.

It occurred to me that although this is monochrome–it’s actually not dissimilar from the selection of Polaroids made by Andrei Tarkovsky’s released through Thames and Hudson entitled Instant Light.

My copy of that book is currently in storage–so I searched for some samples to include side by side with other work by Aparicio to illustrate similarities. Except the site I landed on was this and well, I’m inspired to run in rather a different direction.

As Michelle Aldredge points out–Tarkovsky was extremely anti-Hollywood. He felt that there were two predominant means of expressing ones vision: the descriptive and the poetic. He opted for something that was both third option and middle ground: metaphor.

Yet, he was adamant that what he was doing had little to do with symbolic coding. What he meant by metaphor was something along the lines of this:

I think people somehow got the idea that everything on screen should be
immediately understandable. In my opinion events of our everyday lives
are much more mysterious than those we can witness on screen. If we
attempted to recall all events, step by step, that took place during
just one day of our life and then showed them on screen, the result
would be hundred times more mysterious than my film 

In other words, he sought to present the world of his films not as a story or exercise in formal decryption. It wasn’t even really supposed to mimic the function of dreaming, it was more an effort to use the immersive nature of cinema to convey an approximation of an experience that while not the whole experience might be somehow more than experience.

That’s what I admire so much about Aparicio’s work. The way it hones in on the magnificence and mystery in the mundane of lounging around on a sunny morning in a way that feels both foreign and familiar all at once.

Also: the lighting here is excellent. It appears almost backlit but the light is actually slanting left to right across the frame. The flattens Inés right arm against the overexposed backdrop, while emphasizing her face in profile and lending her body more solid dimensionality. (It also has the effect of making it seem as if she’s tilting towards the camera a bit.)

This would’ve been a good image without any other additions but there’s also the way the light catches her eyelashes and what look like burns from cigarette ashes on her underwear that makes this thoroughly mesmerizing.

(It’s also a bit like a Vermeer where you think that if you watch it long enough the picture will come to life and you’ll get a glimpse of what happens next–even though the medium makes that impossible.)

Paula Aparicio – Untitled (2014)

If there is a single, salient aspect to Aparicio’s work it’s likely the way her photos exude a feeling of post-coital tension between “the waning of ecstatic satiation and the waxing hunger of wanting more.”

This tendency is well suited to her style; but, it’s especially noticeable in the way she photographs women.

I’ve lobbed a couple of shots over the bow of the Good Ship Female Gaze previously–namely with regard to Masha Demianova’s claim her work cultivates an equal and opposite response to Berger’s seminal male gaze as presented in Ways of Seeing.

And although I am doubtful, Aparicio would ever invoke the term female gaze to explain her own work, it would almost certainly be more functional applied to her work than anywhere else I’ve witnesses its deployment.

Upon what grounds to a base such an assertion? I am (unfortunately and much to my eternal chagrin) male bodied; therefore what the fuck can I possibly know about a female gaze?

Well, if there is such a thing as the female gaze–unlike the historical male gaze–it’s almost certainly the opposite of monolithic.

I know that growing up seen by others as ostensibly masculine, my experience of attraction, gender identity and sexual desire almost never lined up with my peers.

And I do realize it’s a dangerous assumption to take the braggadocio of hormonal male children as fact based, but I do know that while far ahead of puberty I shared an almost clinical fascination with sexual intercourse and that this fascination was age appropriate within my peer group, it remained a complete abstraction.

Let me try to unpack that a bit more–I feel a very profound need to articulate this correctly. We’d talked about sex, spent hours imagining the mechanics of it and my friends all tended to extend that imagining by connecting it to their sexual response. There was no separation in the expression of attraction and their sexual desire.

What I thought was attraction was actually a need to be understood. The people who listened to me, supported me and shared glimpses of their inner lives were always the people to whom I found myself drawn.

I remember the first time I ever experienced an attraction that linked up with my sexual desire. It was ninth grade. Her name was Michelle. She was my best friend and she’d had a growth spurt over the summer between junior high and high school. She didn’t really notice and I think her family was struggling to make ends meet with private school tuition, so she kept wearing the same clothes she had the previous year. Her favorite pair of pants were these white khakis. They’d been a bit on the tight side the previous year but now they might as well have been skin tight.

I remember walking behind her to class and noticing the visible lines caused by her underwear. I looked away, immediately. Partly because, I felt like I was violating her privacy but also because I found myself stunningly aroused. But my thoughts didn’t proceed from there to a litany of sexual things I’d like to enact with her. Instead, it orbited the notion of wandering if she felt toward me the way I felt towards her in that moment. The thought that there might be a possibility she did was the fantasy I brought myself to orgasm with again and again throughout high school. (Spoiler alert: she didn’t.)

I am hardly so daft as to suggest that what makes me think the notion of a female gaze applies to Aparicio’s work is because I experienced attraction in an unusual fashion. It’s more that the memory of the feeling resonates very strongly with something in her images.

Source: Flickr / bosquesdecalas

Paula Aparicio – Untitled (2010)

Aparicio is a 25 year-old photographer based in Buenos Aires.

Her photos elide any too obvious debt to her influences mostly because of the meticulous care with which she handles both sexuality and nuances of nudity.

But there’s also the characteristic sense that within her frames seduction and consummation are done; leaving in their wake that palpable feeling of  impermanent post-coital stasis, the waning of ecstatic satiation and the waxing hunger of wanting more.

Source: Flickr / bosquesdecalas