ANNA GASKELL

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/anna-gaskell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Gaskell

Anna Gaskell was born on October 22, 1969 in Des Moines, Iowa. She studied at Bennington College before attending the Art Institute of Chicago. Gaskell’s early photos were self-portraits. However, she decided to begin photographing people acting out stories mainly characters of Alice, from Alice in Wonderland.  Gaskell is best known for her photographic series that she calls “elliptical narratives”  Her works are influenced by film and painting. She lives and works in New York.

The images of the girls are taken through the use of photographic tableaux. Within the images she references children’s games, literature and psychology.  She isolates dramatic moments from larger plots form particular stories. Each images is carefully planned and staged to create an ‘artificial scene’ Gaskell manages to create a dreamlike world that suspends time.

The Girls in the images don’t represent individuals, they act out certain contradictions and desires. The identical clothing that they wear in the series creates a unity within the figures. The mysterious acts that they form in the pictures may be seen as metaphors for “disorientation and metal illness.” Here are a few examples of images from Gaskell’s series “Wonder” in 1996.

HANNAH STARKEY

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/hannah_starkey.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Starkey

http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/hannah-starkey/series-photography_4/27

Hannah Starkey, was born in Belfast in 1971. She lives and works in London. Her Photographs aim to explore the physical and psychological connections between the individual shes photographing and the everyday urban surroundings around them. Since the beginning of her photography career Starkey has mainly focused on using women as her main subjects. She likes to use artificial backgrounds and strong, symbolic  associations of colour and imagery to make her compositions more interesting with a deeper meaning.

Hannah Starkey has described her photographs as exploring ‘women’s lives through their everyday interactions’. In her staged scenes, actresses and other hired models re-enact ostensibly insignificant and banal moments, of the kind that often go unnoticed in daily life. By freezing such moments in time, Starkey hopes to elevate them above the mundane and create lasting allegories for modern life. Her carefully planned and directed compositions fuse influences from painting and cinema. However, she withholds the possibility of any narrative conclusion, leaving viewers to construct their own fictions around her images.

Butterfly Catchers is a large, colour photograph of two teenage girls on a demolition site. They are viewed in the process of picking their way across a landscape of rubble which fills nearly half of the image. Behind them are industrial buildings. Dark clouds  in the distance create an ominous atmosphere. A  white light shining off the roof of a nearby building and reflecting off metallic surfaces in the rubble creates a break in the dark atmosphere. The girls, who face towards the camera, are backlit. Both appear preoccupied; their eyes are lowered as though they are scanning the floor at their feet. A few weeds and grasses emerge from between the bricks on the right side of the image which adds a bit of colour to the grey atmosphere. The photograph was shot in Belfast at the site of a former linen mill which, despite being of particular historical interest, was demolished to make way for a supermarket. The girls are adolescents recruited locally.