Saturday 22 June 2013

My Normalcy: A Body in 8 Parts

 My research is the constitution of the so-called normal and abnormal body and this photo project is an attempt to confront what these terms mean and interrogate the inherent inadequacies of representation, both with words and images. Sarah Kember states in The Shadow of the Object that the "real is always already lost in the act of representation. Any representation, even a photographic one only constructs an image idea of the real." Therefore, words and images that equate with the idea of body normalcy are often contradictory, incoherent and inadequate, especially when considering the dichotomies that exist between what is socially constructed and biologically determined.
 My Normalcy is an ongoing photo project (I have 8 body parts so far) that challenges modern conceptions of the normal and abnormal body. I asked for people to come forward to be photographed from my community who had, what they thought were, unique, unusual, unconventional or remarkable body parts. I photographed these body parts with a Polaroid camera. I also interviewed the people involved and asked them for their stories. I then reduced the interviews to a piece of appropriate text to accompany the image. These are some of the results.



"I don't want to necessarily say it colours my perception of the world, it’s more like a filter. Where rather than there being a smooth transition there’s a kind of antagonism. There’s a kind of intermittent signal. A noise.”







“Sometimes I feel abnormal in a good way, like a superhero, and sometimes abnormal, like a fool or an idiot or different or weird. And normal because I’m used to it, like to imagine myself without it would make me very confused.”






“My physical connection to it is, of course, everything, because you touch everything with your hands all the time.”









I kind of just related it to this macro and micro cosmic thing where I realized that my body is out of  balance and the world is out of balance. Maybe I can bring the world into better balance by working on my self and my own body and, you know, trying to resolve that.”