Melanie Manchot Love Is a Stranger: Photographs1998-2001

By Germany) Fotogalerie in Der Alten Feuerwache (Mannheim and Melanie Manchot

Book Overview

Whether playfully voyeuristic or deliberately ambivalent, Melanie Manchot uses photographs to challenge socially and culturally constructed ideas about beauty, ageing, sexuality and fantasy. This work... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3791325329
• ISBN13: 9783791325323
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Prestel Pub
• Length: 95 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.8" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Wild and startling views of intimacy

Melanie Manchot uses the camera lens like a hard question and sensuous caress. It shows, despite what some of the over-written essay material by art critics contained in her book may assert, that her own ambivalence toward social norms along with her sense of the erotic are the source of her inspiration to produce stark, confrontational, yet paradoxically intimate photographs. Love is a Stranger, the title of the book, is really a kind of metaphore for what Manchot knows -that intimacy is overflowing everywhere among us, complicated and diverted not by the social rules restricting it but by our own questioning of our basic preference for intimacy when occasions for its display arise. The various series of photos in the book alternate between being inspiringly lush and formally restrained, all with a headlong deliberate sense of viewership that her particular use of the camera brings. In producing these photos and video documentations Manchot utilizes the photographic medium to engage some of the most fundamental human impulses, free them from fixed ideas of their proper or accepted understandings, and provide us with permission to consider human relations on a less unencumbered, interpersonal level. She is working inside certain aspects of just what it means to be human in a sensible way. This puts her work on aesthetic terrain that may seem obscure because the specifics of her objective, while so large in scope for being rather neglected in photography, focus with such precision on psychological truths that are largely a matter of rigorous introspection. This is an admirable collection of photographic work that speaks closely to our fundamental ideas about ourselves. It has both a reposing classic sense of artistic achievement and revelatory, cutting edge charisma.