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Indepth Arts News:
"Amy Alder Photographs Leonardo DiCaprio"
2001-04-11 until 2001-05-26
Photographer's Gallery
London, ,
UK
This special commission by young American artist Amy Adler involves
an unusual collaboration with the Hollywood actor, Leonardo
DiCaprio. Earlier this year, DiCaprio agreed to be photographed by
the artist in an intimate, face-to-face, session at her home in London,
and these images form the basis for a new series of unique, colour
portraits.
Amy Adler's work meditates on the role of imagery in formulating both
the identity of subjects, and desire or longing in the minds of viewers.
Very often, as in the series Nervous Character(1999), she has been
the subject of her own work but she does not conceive of it as
self-portraiture - rather than seeing myself as the subject, I think I'm
playing a part: sometimes I1m the lead, sometimes I'm not. At other
times, she has been drawn to figures - film stars and musicians -
whose public images proliferate endlessly through photographs,
magazines and CDs and yet whose private identities remain
inaccessible and elusive to us. This project with Leonardo DiCaprio is
her most sustained examination of the imaging of celebrity to date.
Amy Adler has developed a distinctive method which involves
wedging a drawing between two acts of photography. She starts
with a photograph (in this case, her own, often, someone else's)
makes a drawing of it, and then photographs her drawing. The
drawing is then destroyed, and all that remains is a one-off, glossy
photograph, with the drawing 'trapped' in its surface. In this melding of
the two media, it is ambiguous whether we are looking at a
photographed drawing or a 'drawn' photograph. Her images of
Leonardo are visually very different to a codified or styled publicity
shot or magazine portrait: their relaxed naturalism makes us question
whether we are looking at a portrait of an ordinary, or an extraordinary,
person. For Adler, drawing leads to a special intimacy with her
subjects - the kind of psychological intimacy that compels a teenager,
say, to sketch the face of her favourite pin-up. Yet, in her work itself,
the sense of familiarity which emerges from the closeness of her
encounter with Leonardo, is then denied again through the
distancing, objectifying, effect of her final, glossy, photograph.
It is as if Adler - who bears an uncanny facial resemblance to some of
her subjects - is continuously looking for something or someone who
remains frustratingly elusive. In doing so, she creates subtle,
unsettling images, which probe all the places where desire,
identification and fantasy converge.
IMAGE:
Amy Alder
Nervous Character, 1999
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