In many ways, photography has always been about voyeurism, about examining a subject with or without their consent. The internet magnifies our desire to peer into each other’s windows, and photographers are catching on. Doug Rickard and others have used Google Maps to survey the world. The content on the internet is open for consumption as soon as it gets put out there, and the photo collage artist Julia Geiser takes full advantage the internet’s plethora of imagery in her stunning work.
Her images are beautiful and visually confounding, breaking seemingly breaking the rules of line and space: “The chosen pictures oscillate between legal and aesthetic borders,” she says. She jumps from the moon to the inside of our skulls. The effect is jarring, frightening, and mesmerizing They are also magically anachronistic, and from them, I can’t help but draw a sense of universal womanhood.
Feminine tropes spanning decades make appearances: we have the modernist flapper beside the Victorian. The capitalism of the consumerist 1950s, often disparaged as woman-centric, is prevalent in what look like clippings from vintage advertising prints. A young girl holds a narwol, echoing the virgin that captivates her own single-horned creature, the unicorn, in many medieval works; like the medieval woman, she also stands amidst pine trees. Finally, Geiser addresses contemporary ideas on beauty in a print that reads “True Beauty Comes From the Inside… or Surgery.”
What emerges from these remarkable images is an irrational view of modernity and an even broader sense of femininity, magically spanning time and space. Take a look, and let us know what you think in the comments!
Thanks to iGNANT and Artistic Moods
Images via iGNANT
