Hannah Whitaker
Hannah Whitaker photographs the human figure until it stops reading as human: bodies wrapped in reflective tape and aluminum tubing, lit hard against monochrome grounds. Based in Brooklyn, she has shown at the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media (2020), in the Public Art Fund's citywide exhibition, at Foam Talent (2014), and at Rencontres d'Arles (2012), where she was nominated for the Discovery Prize. In 2021 Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris mounted her solo "Shadow Detail" and brought her work to Paris Photo, the year her book "Ursula" appeared.
Whitaker also writes about the medium: essays on photography's entanglement with technology, and on what a photograph can still claim about truth now that reality and its representation have stopped being easy to tell apart. The pictures make the same argument without words.
"Shadow Detail" extends the book "Ursula": new photographs, a large collaged triptych, her first video work, and several sculptural lamps. The human form is wrapped in reflective tape and aluminum tubing until it turns almost alien, then lit hard against bright monochrome grounds: a futuristic isolation built entirely in front of the camera, not after it.
She plays the scale so that the viewer stands level with the figure and still cannot reach it. Faces are veiled in patterned shadow, and the still lifes (built from the same tape and tubing as the portraits) stand around them like sentinels.
The video work uses the same model as the photographs and holds her between posing and ordinary time: a photograph's single moment stretched into narrative, with the seams between stasis and movement left showing.
"Tangled," the triptych, sets black-and-white stripes and hot pink slashes around a central cloud of textures, patrolled by silhouettes of her model: absurd and slightly menacing at the same time.
