Two photographers who create stylized, atmospheric images featuring people you can’t look away from, Vee Speers and Bastiaan Woudt are ultimately more different than they are alike. If Woudt suggests a documentarian bringing us a stylized vision of another world, then Speers is after a degree of fantasy and escapism that can suggest theatrical productions.
Speers is an Australian photographer based in Paris whose images have the stylized, allegorical look of music video stills.
Here, Speers’ images are divided into two main bodies of work. “Bulletproof” centers on what Speers has called an “army of adolescents” kitted out for “Hunger Games”-style battle. In “Dystopia,” Speers’ images of warriors and princesses blend past and future into a surreal, sci-fi blur. In both series, Speers’ constant is a world populated by beautiful people assuming lyrical poses. “Untitled #32, Bulletproof” features a young huntress with a dead fawn draped around her shoulders and a boomerang in her hand. In “Untitled #1, Dystopia,” a gorgeous woman is wrapped in a cocoon-like white garment, an explosion of butterflies fluttering around her head to amplify her chrysalis form.
Speers’ costumes and accessories glancingly reference the past with their long dresses and atmospheric old-world props — moose antlers, scythes and lengths of chain — conjuring up a general air of history but no specific era, adding to the vague, surface prettiness of her effect.
At their core, the images celebrate male and female beauty and a wafer-thin narrative reminiscent of the sensation of flipping through a fashion magazine. They hold your attention for a beat and then vaporize.
A third, smaller body of work by Speers, the “Botanica” series, is also on view, and it may be the most compelling in her recent visual lexicon because where her people seem slightly blank and overshadowed by their costumes and props, her plants are comparatively complex and visually beckoning.
Woudt is a self-taught Dutch photographer whose sun-bleached, timeworn-looking images recall daguerreotypes and the vintage images of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Walker Evans.
But while Speers works with a muted, pastel palette whose colors are desaturated in Photoshop, Woudt’s black-and-white images are dedicated to the startling contrast of black skin against white backdrops. His dreamy, transportive travelogue “Mukono” documents an alternate universe. It’s a land of seaside wooden shacks, a woman toting a plastic can filled with water on her head and small children posed alone or side by side whose faces feel alternately marked by resilience and vulnerability.
The purpose of “Mukono” was to document Uganda’s water crisis, but instead of reducing the place to trauma, Woudt offers a compelling vision of people whose poverty or circumstance does not detract from their essential humanness.
“Hairpiece” features a young woman seen from behind, her hair coiled into a bun encircled by a metal chain in an image that recalls Vermeer’s paintings of young women. In “Brothers,” two young boys, their backs to each other, are captured almost as silhouettes, the unique curve of their skulls offering a poem of like and unlike in Woudt’s abstract image. “Siblings” depicts a little girl who protectively cradles a child in her arms with a practiced air, a look of stoicism on her tiny, intense face.
Seen side by side, Woudt’s feel like the more compelling images perhaps because he has documented an actual place and populated it with people whose sentience and personalities seem intact. Speers is after a very different effect in her bell jar dramas populated by players whose one job is to act out the photographer’s pretty fever dreams.
ART REVIEW
“Vee Speers: Dystopia and Bulletproof” and “Bastiaan Woudt: Mukono”
Through Sept. 7. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. Jackson Fine Art, 3115 E. Shadowlawn Ave., Atlanta. 404-233-3739, jacksonfineart.com.
Bottom line: A surface interest in style and art historical references can't unite two photographers who create very different effects.
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