Melanie Pullen: Untitled (ELLE), 2014
From the series High Fashion Crime Scenes (2003-17)
If, like me, you love Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse for their drop dead gorgeousness and thanatological interest, then you're also gonna love the work of Melanie Pullen in her photographic series High Fashion Crime Scenes ...
Born in 1975, in New York, but currently living and working in Los Angeles, Pullen grew up in the West Village in a family home regularly visited by poets and painters, including Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. She acquired her first camera as a teen and began shooting images of rock bands for various publications and record labels.
Born in 1975, in New York, but currently living and working in Los Angeles, Pullen grew up in the West Village in a family home regularly visited by poets and painters, including Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. She acquired her first camera as a teen and began shooting images of rock bands for various publications and record labels.
Pullen is most noted, however, for her extensive series of pictures based on vintage crime scene images taken from the files of the NY and LAPD. Inspired by cinematic images and photojournalism, she employed not only well-known actresses and models, but the services of a huge technical crew so that her photo shoots often resembled elaborate movie sets. Each of her pictures could take up to a month to create and the High Fashion Crime Scenes series used millions of dollars worth of designer clothing and accessories.
Surprisingly - or perhaps not - Pullen claims to dislike violence. She is curious, however, about the role that violence plays within the arts and wider culture, as well as the response that people have to violent images. Her work might therefore be described not as an attempt to make violent crime seem glamorous or stylish by dressing up bodies in haute couture, but a critical examination of the way in which the horror and traumatic effect of murder, rape and suicide can be diminished via its aesthetic interpretation and/or portrayal in the media.
Pullen herself has expressed concern with the way that images and descriptions of female corpses - often naked or semi-naked - are used to titilate or add sleazy sensational interest to a narrative; be it a film, a play, a news story, a coroners report ... or even a blog post.
See: Melanie Pullen, High Fashion Crime Scenes, with an introduction by Luke Crissell and essays by Robert Enright and Colin Westerbech, (Nazraelie Press, 2005), 128 pages.
To read a sister post to this one - Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse - please click here.
It seems to me strange to talk about this kind of artistic treatment of violence as 'diminishing' the darkness of the world, rather than enhancing it. Based on my acquaintance with the genre, my perception/suspicion is most killers are compulsive (or possessed), cannot help what they do, and make photos or keep gruesome souvenirs of body/corpse fragments (including hair and jewellery) or beautify their corpses as compensation for the horror of their actions. They are 'true'
ReplyDeletethanatophiles, like the Victorians with their love of 'memento mori'.
Whatever Pullen says about her work, it seems to me what we have here is an attempt, in line with the early Nietzsche, to redeem the devastation of life by aestheticising it . . .