Today’s flood of digital images dwarfs the spectacle. The constant stream of images not only blurs everything, they wash everything together.
The emotional and logical processes associated with images that are meaningful in any way are being transformed – if meaningful images still exist.
The representation of the human body is one of the most meaningful cultural topos. Thus, in the case of nude photographs, the why and how an image is created or displayed is particularly important. The context may still be crucial for the people photographed – but much less so for the recipient.
Gálos illustrates this transformation by reinserting the digital nudes that flow daily through virtual channels into material reality. For the project, she was looking for women whose work is connected to the body and nudity, either in fact or in terms of a social prejudice or expectation.
The twelve models, performance, dance and theatre artists and sex workers who took part in the three-year project were all at least half-naked, but there were some who sent an Akzelfi of themselves every day for 18 months to Gálos, who created montages from the digital images received, which she then transformed into photographic artworks using a wet collodion process. In the process, a lot of visual information was lost – but an emotional/sensory surplus was created that can only be represented in physical reality.
The resulting imagery is a mood document of the transformation of our visual culture, and through it our relationship to nudity – if the category of “document” still exists.