THE WEIGHT I CARRY

2014

n30 A5 colour Inkjet prints.

 

 

The Weight I Carry is a series of images I stumbled on in a huge public domain repository of files, the Internet Archive. They depict women lifting other women on their shoulders. They belonged to a Lift and Carry website, that caters to individuals that have a sexual fetish for lifting and carrying people. There a statuesque quality to them that gives them a pensive, melancholic air; the women that have being lifted are all sleeping (or drugged?) and dangle dead-weighted from the shoulders of the lifter, which in many cases has a dreamy, absent expression on their faces, and it looks like both of them are under hypnosis; they stand in strange places, full of the usual kitschy furniture and props that inhabit pornography sets; their estranged, inadequate features is enhanced by the sloppiness of the photographer; in one image, the leg of a tripod sticks out from the corner, its shadow being cast on the wall; leopard print couches, pink sheets and fake marble columns complete the scenography. perhaps the lack of skill of the photographer produced an unintented gaze in the actresses’s faces, their pensive, inward expressions; These pictures, in many ways, have evaded their purposed modes of engagement, and awakened my own interest, not in the sexuality that should be present in these scenes, but in the unintented esthetic that underlies theses images.