Celine Bodin – The Hunt

Posted by Fabio 23 July 2019

Through her photographs, Celine Bodin investigates the notions of gender and identity in Western culture, weighing the legacy of our art history. The series ‘The Hunt’ is a photography project operating as a brief encyclopedia of female hairstyles from various periods in time, within the cultural frame of Western culture.

The anonymous figures appear as ornate statues: characterised by their hair’s aesthetic association to various revisited stereotypes, they form an unusual yet all too recognisable collection of trophies. Again, the anonymous nature of the series activates our mind’s associative aptitude, while strongly relying on one’s own fantasies and projections of sensuality, innocence, order, freedom, frivolity, or social rank.
The series offers two versions of each image: its positive and inverted form, to point out the systematic and signifying quality of each style, re-enforcing the prototype-like aspect of the presented ‘categories’, or referents. Here, hair acts as a pointer to constructed gender. Echoing classical art, the images become the referent to a mystified icon rather than an actual portrait of an individual.