Körper by Bennie Julian Gay

What happens to the body once the digital reproducibility of its image become virtually limitless? What happens to our understanding of the human form if the predominant way we encounter it comes via the myriad of immaterialized/immaterial images we stare at online? What does it mean for a body to move and morph through layers of depiction? 

In Körper (Bodies), Gay examines our pictorial use of the body as well as its physical presence in our mind and in reality. Gay’s photographs show mannequins, shot from various angles, dressed in various clothes and fabrics (chosen together with stylist Marie Haustein). Grainy and richly textured, these images emphasise the lines of composition and corporeality, while simultaneously blurring those of perception.

 Gay’s pictures neither renounce nor embrace these surrealist undertones, but they are clearly outside the realm of trompe l’oeil. We are never led to believe that these are portraits of actual, living humans. Instead, the photographs inhibit an intermediary space, evoking both a sense of idealised beauty and an uncanny ambiguity.

Speaking on the work, Gay says he drew inspiration from the work of late Japanese photographer Issei Suda, whose pictures of storefront mannequins in the shopping district of Ginza, Tokyo, are striking illuminations of the mundane mysteries of modern life. In Suda’s highly eroticized images, the objectifying and even voyeuristic premise of the mannequin is – quite literally – put on full display. An inorganic likeness of the (female) body, dressed up for the viewing pleasure of consumers.

Like marble statues, whose neo-classical white they often evoke, mannequins are meant to be looked at, not touched. Unlike statues, however, mannequins are supposed to be invisible; they are to function as blank canvasses for fashion arrangements, devoid of any individuality in their abstract perfection.

Gay says his images are, in part, a reflection of his own role as a fashion photographer. He also sees them as a meditation on how we all cast our bodies into images: flat and idealised abstractions of beauty and desirability. This is not just through the use of filters, Gay points out, but also through the limited set of perspectives, poses and situations we inhabit, both off- and online.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gay perceives an intense longing for the opposite in today’s contemporary culture, too: More than ever, we crave the presence of the physical, the imperfections of a reality that is tangible, neither staged nor enhanced. 

This desire for connection, however futile, sits at the heart of Gay’s photography, even if it is only recognised in a tender space of potentiality. The marks and blemishes on the surface of the mannequins call to mind a kind of vulnerable physicality. The translucent clothing that covers these artificial bodies conceals their nakedness while simultaneously drawing attention to their dramatic contortions. Faces are only hinted at, their eyes remaining resolutely outside the frame, alluding not to each mannequin’s humanity or individuality, but to the potential of encountering it.

In almost all aspects of these images we come close to the truth of a person, and yet it is never truly revealed. In this regard, the true meaning of Gay’s photography resides not only in what is depicted, but in all that remains out of view.

Bennie Julian Gay is a photographer based in Berlin.