Beautiful Tensions
Photographs by Meighan Ellis
DAVID HERKT
MEIGHAN ELLIS The Sitter No 2 2005 Archival inkjet on fine art matt, 508 x 508 mm.
The presentation of the self has become a fraught subject for individuals in the age of anxiety. Photography has not only recorded this phenomenon but has arguably been its instigator. Meighan Ellis’ on-going Sitters series foregrounds the effect but also points to its cause. These portraits of young males are a record of a tensely erotic engagement with the camera that is the latest incident in a war more than a century-and-a-half old.
With an international exhibition and publishing history (New Zealand, USA, Australia, the UK and Japan), Ellis is a graduate of the Victoria University School of Architecture and Design. She currently lectures in photography in Auckland and has lived and worked in London, Sydney and Tokyo. In her Sitters series, Ellis examines ’the act of scopophilia: a love of looking via the distance and safety of the camera’, but the tensions of these portraits belie this implied security.
These photographs expand upon ’a (previously private) collection of masculine “beauties“’ but also bounce off the history of photographic portraiture. They are images back-dropped with subtle neutrality: cool-coloured wallpapers, marble and stone, louvered steel, concrete block, or aged weatherboard. The foregrounded sitters present themselves face-forward, locked within the framing viewer’s gaze.
They are an explication of masculinity for a new age, for an era where self-presentation has become a source of disquiet. Since the advent of photography in the nineteenth century, a male subject’s practice for a pose has over-determined the act. The snap has become ubiquitous because it is easy, whereas portraiture requires performance. Ellis’ sitters are stressed about the act of representation in which they are involved. Her subjects move between attempted impassivity and nervous wariness.
Recent art has chronicled the return of male-availability to a libidinal gaze. Ellis places her sitter’s formally, but they are also framed as objects of desire. They are ’beauties’―they must be seen. To add to the burdens of self, the sitters must also factor in sexual and aesthetic evaluation. The series becomes a trope, an electric high-wire performance over tense territory.
The images of the Sitters series are a record of the travails of the male self in the early twenty-first century. These portraits are a confrontation of eye-lines channelled by the photographer. They scrutinise as they themselves are scrutinised. In this context, the only passive resistance available to the photographic subject is to close his eyes.
Ellis has deftly located an aporia in contemporary masculinity. Her record of this moment is valuable historically as an image of necessary distances. Her portraits are a forensic exploration of gender and self-presentation, of aesthetic beauty, and ultimately of tenderness. The photographer’s eye is cool, but not disengaged.
MEIGHAN ELLIS The Sitter No 3 2005 Archival inkjet on fine art matt, 508 x 508 mm.
MEIGHAN ELLIS The Sitter No 10 2005 Archival inkjet on fine art matt, 508 x 508 mm.
MEIGHAN ELLIS The Sitter No 18 2005 Archival inkjet on fine art matt, 508 x 508 mm.
MEIGHAN ELLIS The Sitter No 19 2005 Archival inkjet on fine art matt, 508 x 508 mm.