What's Your Issue?
An ongoing collaborative series of photo shoots with body artist Lisa Berczel of Battledress Paint-n-Body.
This project began in July of 2008. Our overall theme is an exploration through the media of bodypaint and photography of people in all walks of life and periods of history who have experienced various forms of imposed and implied societal conformity.
Each concept is presented not in a single image, but as a group of images, which, viewed together, tell the story of a life experience and the emotional responses of the person being painted and photographed.
The model in each shoot is someone who has personally dealt with, and has strong feelings about, the issue that he or she is portraying artistically. While on paper this project is a collaboration between a body artist (Lisa) and a photographer (Wendy), in reality each story arc is a three part collaboration, with the model as the equally important third leg.
Though the concepts are planned in an overall sense before the shoots, the experience and emotions of each model are what literally give flesh to the outline of the story. This is the magical wild card element, sometimes taking us to directions and depths that we did not expect, but adding impact and reality to a visually staged art form.
"What's Your Issue" can be enjoyed and appreciated as an artistic experience on several levels.
Each viewer may enjoy this series for the pure visual qualities of the images, in fascination with the layers of illusion created by the bodypaint, or for the challenge to examine each series and read the stories through the "clues" of the visual details presented. And each viewer may also find that one or more of our stories strikes a personal resonance with something he or she has experienced, or has known someone who experienced, in his or her own life.
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