Listening to Melanie Manchot talking about her work today I was intrigued by the way she described the figure in context of space.

“I am interested in the boundary between the privacy of the body and the public nature of the environments in which it is often expected to exist. There are endless codes of social behaviour that we all have internalised through the process of socialisation when it comes to our presence in public spaces.  It is often through the tension of the body in relation to these carefully chosen locations that the meaning of the work comes to the foreground.”

The human figure is distinctly small in relation to an open landscape when considered in a scale of reality.  However, within Manchot’s series ‘Liminal Portraits’ the opposite is true.  The figure dominates the image not only compositionally in size, but also through the use of fill in flash the mother literally sits right in the foreground.

Melanie started photographing her mother in 1995 and worked with her almost continuously until 2000.  ”I think her naked body talks eloquently about the issues of our current obsession with beautiful bodies, with our image-oriented culture, our desire to control our bodies and the fear of aging. Aging has come to be seen as a problem and is no longer accepted as a progression through life.”