Annegret Soltau: On the Photographic Skin
Keywords:
Photography, Postmodernism, Feminism, Performance, EmbroideryAbstract
Skin is a limes—a porous threshold between interiority and exteriority. Annegret Soltau’s practice, beginning in the mid-1970s, stages the body as a means of reflecting on the representation of womanhood. Her so-called
Fotoradierungen (photo-etchings) and Fotovernähungen (photo-restitchings) transpose body art onto the photographic medium, seizing photography not as an instrument for the documentation of ephemeral artistic practices—as was often the case with performance art in the 1960s and 70s—but as the very instance of a critical engagement with the female body and its aging.
This research article conceptualizes “skin” both as the bodily surface represented in Soltau’s work and as the “photographic skin”, the vehicle for the artist’s intermedial experiments between performativity and photography. From a postmodern perspective, Soltau probes the limits of representational media, transposing the graphic gesture first onto performance, and subsequently onto the photographic negative and positive print. Figuratively, “skin” also marks the margin delimiting the inner and outer worlds of the artist, the threshold between appearance and identity. The article examines how Soltau reconfigures the boundary between performativity and photography through the lens of “skin”.
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