Monika Macdonald

biography

Monika Macdonald was born in 1969 in Sweden. She moved to Stockholm where she studied photography after graduation.

In 2001 she settled in London and worked as a freelancer, primarily making reportage for newspapers and magazines. She returned to Sweden in 2007 and ever since has focused on working on self initiated projects.

In her thick photographs, plenty of souls and flesh, inhabited by strength and vulnerability, Monika Macdonald breathes an unusual eroticism into photography that provokes a vision of interiority rather than fantasy. They invite us to observe moments of abandonment as well as introspection where distant (and yet concrete) beings are grasped in their daily lives as desiring subjects rather than objects of desire. Here the intimate is suggested, and something of the neglected order of existence surfaces.

Monika Macdonald shows what remains in the absence, the flesh of everyday life: meeting, abandonment, taste for solitude… The bewitchment of her images lets us penetrate beyond the visible and glimpse this intimacy that is usually killed.

“I don’t like the idea of taking pictures that much. But I always come back to it. There are no words to describe the feeling of being close to something. That’s why I keep going. I oscillate between different worlds to which I try to link myself. My images are memories. To access a sense of loneliness and vulnerability. To be admitted beyond reason, far from what is called reality.”

Series

Hulls, 2018

Serie | Monika Macdonald continues her process of experimentation with the photographic act by working like an entomologist, considering the model as a specimen that she watches evolve, alone, immersed in herself, far from her social environment, in an enclosed space.

In Absence, 2018

Serie | The headlights cut through the darkness, we are on our way. Away from the everyday, away from the daily grind, perhaps away from ourselves, for a while. To what? Or whom Perhaps we don’t know. Towards something else; that’s what matters. How to live your life, and for whom?

Monika Macdonald séries

Hulls, 2018

Serie | Monika Macdonald continues her process of experimentation with the photographic act by working like an entomologist, considering the model as a specimen that she watches evolve, alone, immersed in herself, far from her social environment, in an enclosed space.

Monika Macdonald séries

In Absence, 2018

Serie | The headlights cut through the darkness, we are on our way. Away from the everyday, away from the daily grind, perhaps away from ourselves, for a while. To what? Or whom Perhaps we don’t know. Towards something else; that’s what matters. How to live your life, and for whom?

Monika Macdonald séries

Hulls, 2018

Serie | Monika Macdonald continues her process of experimentation with the photographic act by working like an entomologist, considering the model as a specimen that she watches evolve, alone, immersed in herself, far from her social environment, in an enclosed space.

Monika Macdonald séries

In Absence, 2018

Serie | The headlights cut through the darkness, we are on our way. Away from the everyday, away from the daily grind, perhaps away from ourselves, for a while. To what? Or whom Perhaps we don’t know. Towards something else; that’s what matters. How to live your life, and for whom?