Alluring Deceptions: the work of Valérie Belin
FT Weekend, May 3, 2024
Alluring Deceptions
David Campany on the work of Valérie Belin, FT Weekend, May 4/5, 2024
Untitled, from the series Michael Jackson, 2003. Gelatin silver print, 63.4 x 49.2 inches.
Untitled, from the series Michael Jackson, 2003. Gelatin silver prints 63.4 x 49.2 inches.
In 2003, the artist Valérie Belin made a series of photographs of Michael Jackson lookalikes. Not the preternaturally gifted child Michael, but the troubled, older megastar. We can assume the lookalikes never met him. They were mimicking an image, or an amalgam of images. Jackson was probably the most recognisable person on the planet, although his fame was inseparable from the lurid spectacle of his physical shape shifting. What was going on with his face? Plastic surgery? Good old-fashioned cosmetics? Photoshop? He seemed in a permanent state of transition. A morphing icon. Many people made a living as Jackson impersonators, but they had to select a look from the evolving catalogue. In a white studio, Belin portrayed a handful of them under stark light as they struck a classic 1990s Jackson pose. Her photographs add to the disturbing hall of mirrors. They also allow us to contemplate it at a chilly distance.
Based in Paris, Belin has been interested in this kind of alluring deception for over three decades. Her work has been celebrated in France although it is less known internationally, but this is changing. The daily platter of contrived celebrity culture, coupled with the widespread desire to brand oneself in the online visual marketplace has made Belin’s circumspect approach entirely refreshing. This month she is to be honoured as Master of Photography at Photo London, with a major exhibition surveying her work.
Untitled, from the series Crystal 1, 1993. 29.5 x 19.7 inches
Belin’s interest in the way photographs present and package the world is often right there in the titles of her series. Stage Sets, Masks, Brides, Models, Magicians, Mannequins. She established her concerns in 1993, photographing cut glass objects against deep black backgrounds. Since glass is transparent, we see not the object itself but what it reflects and refracts. Pure light. In this sense, looking at glass is not unlike looking at a photograph. We see the light that has bounced off the world and passed through a lens to form an image. Then, our vision passes through the non-existent surface of the image to land on… what, exactly? Every photograph is illusionistic and glassed-off, accessible but ultimately elusive. It’s what makes photography so vivid and yet so deathly and phantom-like. Of course, none of this bothers us most of the time, but Belin wants to draw our attention to the strangeness at the heart of the matter.
Bodybuilders 1999 was her first series depicting people. Pumped-up men and women stand before her exacting camera and inscrutable eye. “I’m not really a portraitist,” she tells me from her Paris studio. “I photograph groups, types, more like a scientist.” Her images deflect from any psychological insight into her subjects. Contemporary art photography is dominated by confessions and promises of revealed inner life. Belin resists all that. What is it bodybuilders do in competition? They show off their toned forms by holding silent poses to be viewed from particular angles. In other words, they aspire to become photographs. Almost. In Belin’s hands the whole situation is disarming, leaving the over-fortified bodies looking unexpectedly vulnerable.
Untitled, from the series Bodybuilders 1, 1999. Gelatin silver print 39.4 x 31.5 inches.
Untitled, from the series Mannequins, 2003. Gelatin silver print 39.4 x 31.5 inches
Mannequins 2003 updates the Surrealists’ obsession with fake female form. “I came across a suite of hyperreal mannequins. They had been developed using casts of actual bodies,” she explains, “which is almost a 3D version of photography.” Her photographs evoke a sales catalogue or window display, but their impersonal sheen pushes any realism into the uncanny. Two decades on, the mannequins and her pictures of them look as if they could have been generated entirely by AI. Camera technologies have always been in flux, but Belin’s artistic career maps almost exactly onto photography’s ever deepening connection with the digital and the virtual. Should a photograph refer back to some concrete reality that we’d like to think was ‘there’ in the visible world? Or, is the medium so entangled with pretence and artifice, and so integrated into networks of computation that its reference can be only to other images? Belin saw these questions coming.
While her work can involve careful post-production, it always begins with something in front of her camera, something she has seen and decided to explore. “I’m not interested in generating just with a computer,” she tells me. “I want to start with reality, and then push photography until it comes close to pure image.” Invariably, however, what attracts her in the real world comes with its own complicated reality. What is a lookalike, a mannequin or a bodybuilder if not an aspiration to transform, or become something else? When Belin photographs shop windows or theatre sets it is with the understanding that their purpose is to be made over into other spaces, of fantasy and suspended disbelief. In 2001 she photographed transexual people in the early stages of transition, one set of visual characteristics giving way to another. Photography’s traditional function of defining and fixing appearance comes undone.
‘Beltline Burger, Atlanta’, from the series Reflections, 2019. Pigment print mounted on Dibond 68.9 x 52 in.
The key influences for Belin have been the Baroque, with its love of excessive visual ornament, and Minimalist art with its emotional restraint and detached air of seriousness. She relishes the tension, offering visual immediacy only to unsettle and leave things ambiguous. Belin is not out to ingratiate, but she is interested in the way our image world is nearly always about ingratiation. With their centred subjects and large scale, her exhibition prints hang on the wall with the swagger and confidence of classical painting. The grand size is used to invite a closer look at the smaller details, which often undo the first impression. The nearer you get, the less sure things become. Is that real hair on the mannequins? Is that a reflection in glass or a double-exposure?
‘The Girl Who Never Died’, from the series Heroes, 2023. Pigment print 68.1 x 51.2 inches
‘Lady Heart’, from the series Heroes, 2023. Pigment print 68.1 x 51.2 inches
For Belin, the other important aspect of the digital era is the seemingly endless availability of past culture. Films in cinemas used to come and go, as did broadcast television programmes. Magazines and newspapers would be consumed and discarded. Today, past and present are equally accessible online, and permanently there. History feels less like perspective lines disappearing into the past than a dense layering, one thing seen flatly through another. For a few years now, Belin has been making layered works. The latest series, Heroes 2023, is a group of eight portraits, although what is being portrayed remains deep in a forest of signs. The points of reference appear to come from theatre with its dramatic make-up, and mime, an art of pretence as mute as photography. Starting with a traditional portrait sitting, Belin then builds up a digital collage with fragments of images from different eras. At the centre of each picture is not so much an individual woman as a swirl of associations. Film noir. Detective comics. Theater programs. The feel is not exactly ‘retro’. There is something perfectly contemporary about these works, formed by our present means of retrieving the past.
The fate of photography is clearly up for grabs, and it has as much to do with what we might want from it as what technology will do with it. This is how it has always been. Whether we are right to feel it more acutely today is yet to be seen. In the meantime, an exhibition of the work of Valérie Belin is a provocative place to think about it all.
