bill durgin
Artist's Statement
My photographs reflect a fascination with the body as form. The complex figurations, undulating arrangements of flesh, as the body seems to collapse onto itself, image an almost abstracted figure lacking appendages and hair. The physical structure becomes not just a shell, but a moving sculpture of skin, muscle, fat, and bone.
The gesture within each photograph is created through exploring my own physical limitations and collaborative improvisation with dancers and performers. Often I will come up with a pose and demonstrate it and then ask the model to repeat or respond to it. Each pose transmogrifies the figure towards abstraction; exaggerating or diminishing the skeletal structure until it approaches an amorphic form. I want the bodies to be recognized as bodies, but also to be detached from common perceptions of the figure. Bound within each singular view, the uncanny figures convey the body as both abject and marvelous.
Composed through a 4x5 view camera, I place the figure within the location and select an angle to shoot from. I remove furnishings to create a perspective which foregrounds the rudiments of the architecture, the light, and the figure itself. Each space is empty, but not anonymous. It is a setting not a set, within which the figure is grounded in a particular environment revealed by the traces of the doorway, ceiling, or floor. Suspended along the edges of the space, along the edges of figuration, these photographs also move along the edges of the photographic genres of narrative, portraiture, and environment.
