The act of obscuring faces and bodies. Faces hidden beneath colour smudges. Or ripped out of works entirely. Rosanna Jones’ tactile work is of a personal nature and is aimed at examining visual identity and notions of embodiment.
For the photographer, her process has become therapeutic. Her ripped up portraiture reflects on her own life, this can be seen in series such as Destroy. “…I guess you could say it’s a little sadistic to enjoy bleaching, tearing, scouring, and outright burning away the subject’s eyes, face, or other body parts, but there is definitely a close connection between Destroy and my relationship to my own body and mind,” she expresses in an interview with Format.
The hereditary duality (photography both immortalizes and acts violently) that Rosanna addresses in her work is photography and by extension the photograph’s ability to either immortalize their subject or to behave as an act of violence toward that subject. The exploitation of the female form in fashion photography is one of the clearest examples of this duality and/or contradiction. Rosanna’s deliberate intervention in the images of her beautiful models obscures them. Her method of ripping, bleaching, burning and blotching out her models is an aggressive act and mimics the potentiality the camera has to create violence.
To check out more of Jones’ work visit her website.
