Elina Brotherus: It’s Not Me, It’s a Photograph

Elina Brotherus
It’s Not Me, It’s a Photograph

Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus tells the story behind some of the most important photos in her career, in which she uses her own naked body as a material. Read more …

In this video Elina Brotherus (b. 1972) talks about photographs from her latest book “Artist and her Model”, one of TIME magazine’s favorite photobooks from 2012.

“I want to see” Brotherus says, explaining how her work is a kind of game of hide and seek, showing and not showing. She explains how she does not like smiles in photographs, and why she likes repetition of certain themes, such as reflections and bathing. Brotherus also talks about how she stages herself as a model, creating images that are personal, yet deliberately open for the observer’s projections. How she is revealing and hiding at the same time, how the photos reflect stages in her life, but how at the same time she is “making things into objects”. What we see is after all not reality, but “just a photo”.

Being at the same time both the model and the artist, Brotherus is exploring the relationship between object and subject, gaze, artist and model.

Interview by Christian Lund, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, November 2012.

Filmed by Martin Kogi and Jonas Jørgensen.

Edited by Kamilla Bruus and Christian Lund

Supported by Nordea-fonden.

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