In the last few posts we explored the effects created by woven, digital and raw, rough, smooth, and glistening surfaces. There are all sorts of surfaces out there and, when cleverly arranged, composed or juxtaposed, they can be used to create intriguing effects such as disguising a subject.
An example of this exercise in camouflaging via different surfaces can be spotted in the vintage pictures from the Victorian age collected in Linda Fregni Nagler's book The Hidden Mother (2013).
These images – featured in the 2013 Venice Art Biennale – show how Victorian mothers often disguised themselves behind rugs, carpets, curtains, gloomy damasked tapestries and blankets and pretended to be chairs and couches or part of the studio backdrop to make sure a photographer could take a decent studio picture of their babies (slow exposure times and impatient infants were recipes for photographic disasters).
Quite often the results of this eerie practice (that continued until the 1920s) were rather scary as the mothers ended up looking like creepy ghosts in draped fabrics ready to take the baby to a more mysterious and dark world.
These ghostly figures of mothers who temporarily lost their identity are echoed in portraits created by photographer Patty Carroll for her long-running series "Anonymous Women", now collected in a volume published by Daylight Books.
Carroll is not just a photographer, but also a lecturer and has taught photography continuously at University level, both full and part-time.
Carroll's first images from the "Anonymous Women" series show a clear derivation from the portraits collected by Linda Fregni Nagler, since her subjects are covered under soft furnishings and fabrics and resemble ghosts.
Little by little, her compositions expanded to incorporate female dummies hiding among bright fabrics with Pucci-like swirls or standing among shoes and bags; at times the dummies seem to be part of the set decor, at others they morph into plants and flowers or pose with cups and pots as if lost at a Mad Hatter's tea party.
The invisibility of Carroll's women hints at wider themes, from self-obliteration to the way women are hidden, subjugated and erased from society, repressed and oppressed by routines and stereotypes, while their identities are suppressed by avalanches of surreal and kitsch objects.
The Victorian images collected by Linda Fregni Nagler had a comical edge when the mother who was trying hard to disguise herself became easily identifiable; in the same way there is humour in Carroll's pictures, an effect achieved through bright and vividly coloured outfits and bizarre props, elements that allow these otherwise anonymous creatures to get a personality of their own.
So these images can be considered as the informal and surreal versions of formal portraits of women from another century. Carroll employs visually striking textiles and graphic patterns to create deceptive sets that are at times accompanied by funny Edward Gorey-like descriptions. To describe her "Stairsy" image showing a figure in a black and white graphic attire that has tripped on a staircase decorated with a dazzle-like print, Carroll writes: "Wearing her finest striped outfit proved hazardous in ascending the staircase, maybe nude would have been better."
Even though the themes are more or less the same in all her "Anonymous Women" portraits, Carroll has progressed in how she portrays her subjects: in her "Draped" series her subjects are perfectly integrated in the domestic environment and they are simply covered under an ominous fabric that hides their shapes and silhouettes.
Rather than providing a comforting environment, the house and furnishings around them camouflage their individual identities, while the interior decor swallows them.
As Carroll points out on her website, this series references draped statues from the Renaissance, nuns in habits, women wearing the burka, the Virgin Mary, priests' and judges' robes, and ancient Greek and Roman dress.
The series is also a small tribute to Scarlett O'Hara, who pulled down her drapery to fashion a beautiful gown. In the next series, "Reconstructed", Carroll's subjects perform domestic trickeries while trapped by their objects and obsessions, while "Demise" marks failure, submission to the dwelling and the end of the Anonymous Woman.
The dichotomy between identity and anonymity characterises fashion and Martin Margiela has often shown in both his life and on the runway that there is power in anonimity and invisibility, so in many ways Carroll's images – while evoking also Sheila Legge, Surrealist Phantom at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and calling to mind Leigh Bowery's experiments in mutating the human form – have some connections with art, costumes and fashion.
For these obvious connections you can bet that we will soon see a campaign for a fashion house, a brand or collection shot by Patty Carroll and featuring her anonymous women.
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