Hulls, 2018
In complete coherence with her previous project, In Absence, 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.
This time, she devotes herself to the masculine. If her images echo, in the treatment of the nude, the pose or the light, a classical pictorial iconography, she draws up portraits far removed from the traditional representations of the virility and beauty of the men she observes.
Monika Macdonald, once again, shatters norms. It is about flesh, disorder, doubts, the vulnerability of body, mind and feelings.
She organizes posing sessions behind closed doors, and these face-to-face encounters sometimes seem so trying, so much so that the photographer/photographed relationship is pushed to its ultimate limits. The result is shattering images, whether derisory, soft or raw, even burlesque: moments of abandonment, introspection or letting go, almost of madness. The photographer attempts here to explore the condition of man, stripped of false pretences and simulacra, far from the assigned and established roles.
And these men, under the watchful and benevolent gaze of Monika Macdonald, are of a confounding and disturbing beauty.
Caroline Bénichou
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