For over 50 Years, I have used the body as either the subject or its device to extend the metaphoric pose to performance. Since the mid-nineties, my work has addressed ageing or ageism that resists empowering maturity as a ‘different beauty’. The Extended Breathing series challenges this taboo with an alternate beauty of perseverance and experience. This work considers how far I can reduce the activity’s narrative assumptions and still retain a body-reading that reveals itself in time.
Recording full breaths is a celebration of life that required me to stand perfectly still before the camera for a set duration. Accordingly, chest movement and torso sway were recorded while my feet remained anchored; as crisp and detailed as the landscape. Yet, in the excess of the one-hour exposure, the recorded activity stops being a photographic document.
What may have begun as endurance becomes the gesture’s full durational movement through the slow shutter speed. The excitement for me was to find the balance with the lush detail and tonal saturation provided by pushing the camera’s optics without denying the performative event and gendered position.