Brigitte Lustenberger.
Brigitte Lustenberger's photographs envelop her own fascination with looking into pictures of people looking at things out of the corner of the frame and in full frames of various slightly non-descript objects of voyeurism themselves, staring at which unfolds their meaning. The mystery of the human gaze is isolated further in her series of profile portraits of women showing at the Musee de L'Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland, beginning this week.
There are many questions that seem to lurk above these faces caught in a moment of quizzical questioning. The motion of the models' eyes, looking back as if aware of being looked at, is bracketed by a solemn, neutral stillness - of the faces, frozen as if posing for the long-exposure of a daguerreotype, and also of the dark backdrops. The heightening of the eye's action opens up an exploration of all the gazes going on in this picture - the model's, the photographer's, our own.
In Lustenberg's words, the main issues behind these photographs are 'the study of the gaze, the interplay between absence and presence in a photographic image, and the fact that the reading of a photograph is most often triggered by a collective memory'.
The same, implicitly shared gesture of presence and of awareness of another's is able to express such different things from face to face in the series - it can be read as a mirror of the one looking, even as it seems to be saying something in reaction to the viewer.
Such is the vivid illusion of these photographs, capturing an endless mirror moment of reaction that is artificially, but credibly, suspended for as long as the image may be seen, almost like a film loop. 'Movies and stories enriched my visual vocabulary,' the artist says, which seems particularly a propos of the suspended gaze, 'however, it is not so much about recreating these references - film stills or stories, etc. - but about reconstructing my memories of them: I make a photograph of a memory'.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
BRIGITTE LUSTENBERGER
To 4 Nov 2007
Musee de l'Elysee
18 avenue de l'Elysee
1014 Lausanne, Switzerland
T: +41(0)21 . 3169911
)
)
)