A Looking after Inez

Jules Spinatsch

Frozen moments of forced post-photographic voyeurism.

This photographs are screenshots taken from the website of Inez van Lamsweerdes’ Gallery Ravestijn while applying the magnifying glass function which is provided on the website itself. This magnifying function displays blow-ups from certain parts and thus covering other eras of the image, while the cursor is moved across the image, resulting in surreal digital collages.

The gallery forces the viewer to apply a tool known from botanical observation or criminal investigations to photographic postproduction programs. The viewer participates in a viewing mode that offers two indistinct possibilities: to explore the photographic quality of the print or the photogenic quality of the (predominantly female) nudes’ details. But certainly it offers to come virtually closer to whatever one is looking for. It is thus the combination of the magnifying glass and subject matter that makes it an near pornographic (self-?) experience.Strategy of the gallery or not, it does influence they way you look at the work of Inez van Lamsweerde, who in the 90’s was a adored young artist. Among the first to apply digital technology into interesting new imagery, she has moved (with her partner) into fashion only since. Somehow this collages are close in many aspects to what IvL has done early in her career. But consciously or not the female run gallery (and Inez herself ?) offers the viewer to act as Inez and to reenact after Inez by creating such digital collages and saving them as his or her experience of looking at Inez.

This are some of thoughts I had when I stumbled over the magnifying glass function on The Ravestijn Gallery’s website. Of course it was not the first website offering this function but as I said, the combination with the subject matter plus my memory of Inez van Lamsweerde as an artist I adored in the 90, (we have shown both in gallery Ars Futura in Zurich) triggered this little series. I made it in one day. I had totally different plans that day - not to work at all - but it was what I did all day, after clicking in the morning on a link from the dear photography-now newsletter.