Paul Jeff is a professor, experimental artist, and photographer who has worked under various pseudonyms for the last 30 years. The project that I will be exploring here is Paul + A which was a series of collaborations with a different female artist for each project. The project was named Life is Perfect and it involved the artist being locked in a hotel room for 24 hours and a series of 'ambitious, repetitive scenarios based on theatrical directions...where they acted out fifty passionate love scenes, all of which ended in a brutal murder' (Bright, 2010)
In this image above the metal coat hanger in her hands is wired to the mains plug. I chose these pieces as they are performative and each image ends in a death. As stated I am interested in the photographic disappearance and this could also be photographic death, the moment of death, people used to make death masks of the dead which captured their last 'face' now amongst the prolific images it would be good to focus on the final moments, Walter Schels did this and photographed the subjects before and after death (with their express permission)
However, going back to the staged image, I was interested in these as they all take place in a hotel room and the environment itself is artificiality, there is no connection between the participants to their surroundings which is perhaps why the images are cold and a murder taking place does not seem out of place. In my own images, I am very much connected to the rooms in my images, I am in all my images, without being in them as my presence is everywhere. In the top image here, the participants only are present as the characters they have chosen to play. Jeff in his practice here; 'The sublime moment of death and sexual congress are collapsed metaphorically into the photographic instant, which constitutes both testimony and fiction' (Bright, 2010:192) Two murders were committed every hour and it was unknown how the images would come out, as Bright states the chances of failure were high. I enjoy the thought that there may be failure and every shoot I do I know there is always the risk of failure. This is why it's always interesting, as failure is often so much more useful than success if I want to develop a piece of work. Jeff's pictures do end up looking like a crime scene but in these images, the perpetrator is still in the image.
In the image above the couple have drank a glass of champagne for every cut they have made on their bodies and now they hold a scalpel to each other's throat. So here the setup environment, and the play-acting make these images a compelling read as the participants may not know each other, but maybe they do, the impersonal here becomes deeply intimate as we the viewer (voyeur) stare into the abyss of these frames. In both these images you can see the photographer has a remote trigger in his hands and the wire leading out of the frame of the image to capture the moment that he chooses us to see. We as a view are now also complicit in this scene, we are the witnesses. In my own images, the question would be why bother to photograph disappearance, why not just disappear? I think the answer is that my images are a warning of my disappearance a premonition, perhaps. Just like the before and after death images - perhaps this is a last look ...
I leave you with a further image from Walter Schels as these really do have sublime beauty and we are privileged to be allowed to view these images of the most private moment.
References
ray.yorksj.ac.uk. (n.d.). Dr Paul Jeff - Research at York St John. [online] Available at: https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/profile/2082 [Accessed 28 Jan. 2024].
Bright, S. (2010). Auto focus: The self-portrait in contemporary photography. London: Thames & Hudson.
Another, J. (n.d.). Paul Jeff. [online] morebeautifulthangod. Available at: https://morebeautifulthangod.wordpress.com/tag/paul-jeff/ [Accessed 28 Jan. 2024].
Rosenberg, D. (2014). How One Photographer Overcame His Fear of Death by Photographing It. [online] Slate. Available at: https://slate.com/culture/2014/08/walter-schels-life-before-death-includes-portraits-of-people-before-and-after-dying-photos.html [Accessed 28 Jan. 2024].
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