Read Time 11 minutes
The images that made me
How much does imagery help shape the person we become? Which photographs are the ones we remember as changing us in some way––creatively, personally, professionally––or simply as marking the passage of time?
We ask industry leaders, artists and experts in visual culture to talk us through the five photographs that have brought them to where they are now. Think Desert Island Discs, but make it art.
Art buyer, elder emo and co-founder of Darklight; a delicious cocktail of ingredients that make up Mimi Gray’s signature aesthetic of moody palettes and horror-inspired subjects 🍸🩸 There’s not going to be a whole lot of colour in here – you’ve been warned.
Damien Hirst with dead head, AndrĂş Morin-Le-Jeune [1991]
With Dead Head is a black and white photograph of the artist Damien Hirst as a teenager, posing with the head of a corpse whilst drawing anatomy at a morgue in Leeds. The photo, selected and enlarged for Hirst’s seminal solo exhibition in London, 1991 [incidentally my birth year], feels to me like a barometer of the times. Of shock art and scandal. And a far cry from the pleasant paint-splattered flowers Hirst is producing today lol.
I chose this first image for this reason, not because I love to look at it, but because it fascinates me in the same way I imagine death still fascinates Hirst. As it did at sixteen. Terrified, grinning, half expecting the head to open its eyes and go: ‘Grrrrraaaaaagh!’
Identical twins [Cathleen and Colleen], Roselle, N.J, Diane Arbus [1966]
To segue clumsily on from Dead Head, which gains its strength from compositional oppositions [Hirst with his young head, full of hair, smiling; aside the bald swollen, sallow crane of the old man, his mouth clamped shut], my second image would have to be this one from Diane Arbus.
The two girls that inspired Kubrick’s creepy twins in the Stephen King film adaptation of The Shining. Outwardly identical, but with mirror opposite expressions on their faces. One twin with bright innocent eyes, stands aside the other, shrouded by an air of sadness: her lips downturned, her eyelids hooded. ‘Nothing can surpass the strange beauty of reality, if a photographer knows where to look,’ to quote Arthur Lubow [New York Times].
Other iconic images by Arbus, for me, have to be her photographs of Halloween [c.1964] . My favourite day of the year. Yes, I truly am the emo white girl stereotype. I’ve made my peace. But the old masks. The camaraderie of those little monsters! They’re just, well, creepy. As was Diane’s MO.
As Patricia Bosworth documented in her eponymous biography of the artist, when Arbus’s work was first exhibited at MOMA in their ‘Recent Acquisitions’ show in 1965, the photo department’s librarian had to go in each morning and wipe spit from the images. SUCH WAS THE OUTRAGE inflicted upon her unwitting audience!
To segue clumsily on from Dead Head, which gains its strength from compositional oppositions [Hirst with his young head, full of hair, smiling; aside the bald swollen, sallow crane of the old man, his mouth clamped shut], my second image would have to be this one from Diane Arbus.
The two girls that inspired Kubrick’s creepy twins in the Stephen King film adaptation of The Shining. Outwardly identical, but with mirror opposite expressions on their faces. One twin with bright innocent eyes, stands aside the other, shrouded by an air of sadness: her lips downturned, her eyelids hooded. ‘Nothing can surpass the strange beauty of reality, if a photographer knows where to look,’ to quote Arthur Lubow [New York Times].
Other iconic images by Arbus, for me, have to be her photographs of Halloween [c.1964] . My favourite day of the year. Yes, I truly am the emo white girl stereotype. I’ve made my peace. But the old masks. The camaraderie of those little monsters! They’re just, well, creepy. As was Diane’s MO.
As Patricia Bosworth documented in her eponymous biography of the artist, when Arbus’s work was first exhibited at MOMA in their ‘Recent Acquisitions’ show in 1965, the photo department’s librarian had to go in each morning and wipe spit from the images. SUCH WAS THE OUTRAGE inflicted upon her unwitting audience!
Photographer unknown, Belgium [1894]
Whilst I’m on family photographs, this image of my great great grandparents couldn’t go unmentioned. It’s a running joke in my family that we’re not totally sure of our roots, or my parents heritage. Austrian, English, Belgian, Lebanese, Dad born in Guinea, raised in Morocco…
So discovering this gem of a photograph at my Oma Huguette’s house in Aix when she passed a couple of years ago, felt like a beautiful revelation.
Taken in 1894, it’s the oldest photographic record I know of in my family. And given photography’s short history, it feels like an important signifier of the times. Aesthetically of course, the styling and setting are also right up my gracht.  The dress, the balloon sleeves, the blurred face of my great grandmother, tiny and impatient with the lengthy process, and the eerie heart-shaped, tree-like skeleton that bleeds out on the backdrop behind them. *chefs kiss*
STILL CAPTURED FROM VIDEO PERFORMANCE
The Levitation of St Therese, Marina Abramović [2009]
I think it’s fair to call Abramović the most famous contemporary performance artist. Of this particular subsection of modern art, not many artists seem to pierce through the walls of household renown quite like Marina has. Many recognise her for the still of her 1980 piece Rest Energy, performed with long-term collaborator and [then] lover, Ulay. The pair lean back holding either half of a bow and arrow, creating the potential for his arrow, pointed straight at her heart, to fly. Demonstrating perfectly the dichotomy of falling in love 🥲
Marina’s work always has you on a knife-edge. Sometimes literally. She plays with extremes: extreme pain, danger, emotion, exhaustion and discomfort – which makes the memories of seeing her work in person so poignant.
The Levitation of St Therese really had me bewitched at the time I saw it. Inspired by the miraculous story of 16th century mystic, Teresa of Avila – who through her writings speaks of unholy levitation. It was recorded in the kitchen of an abandoned Spanish convent, formerly inhabited by Carthusian nuns who fed more than 8000 orphans at the site. But for Marina, this work was also autobiographical: ‘In my childhood the kitchen of my grandmother was the centre of my world: all the stories were told in the kitchen, all the advices regarding my life were given in the kitchen, all the future-telling through the cups of black coffee took place in the kitchen, so it was really the center of the world, and all my best memories come from there.’
Relatable.
I think it’s fair to call Abramović the most famous contemporary performance artist. Of this particular subsection of modern art, not many artists seem to pierce through the walls of household renown quite like Marina has. Many recognise her for the still of her 1980 piece Rest Energy, performed with long-term collaborator and [then] lover, Ulay. The pair lean back holding either half of a bow and arrow, creating the potential for his arrow, pointed straight at her heart, to fly. Demonstrating perfectly the dichotomy of falling in love 🥲
Marina’s work always has you on a knife-edge. Sometimes literally. She plays with extremes: extreme pain, danger, emotion, exhaustion and discomfort – which makes the memories of seeing her work in person so poignant.
The Levitation of St Therese really had me bewitched at the time I saw it. Inspired by the miraculous story of 16th century mystic, Teresa of Avila – who through her writings speaks of unholy levitation. It was recorded in the kitchen of an abandoned Spanish convent, formerly inhabited by Carthusian nuns who fed more than 8000 orphans at the site. But for Marina, this work was also autobiographical: ‘In my childhood the kitchen of my grandmother was the centre of my world: all the stories were told in the kitchen, all the advices regarding my life were given in the kitchen, all the future-telling through the cups of black coffee took place in the kitchen, so it was really the center of the world, and all my best memories come from there.’
Relatable.
Various, Rebecca Horn
I first encountered German visual artist Rebecca Horn’s work at Tate Modern, and felt immediately drawn to her sculptures and body modifications. As with many artists, the more I learnt about Horn’s life, the more I felt compelled to learn.
Growing up in post-war Germany, she felt shame at her mother tongue, and found drawing as a preferable means of visual expression and communication than spoken language. Rebelling against parents who tried to force her into studying economics [also relatable], she attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg [Hamburg’s Academy of Fine Arts to you and me] to study art and philosophy instead. But this decision had an unfortunate outcome which would come to shape her visual style forevermore.
Horn was unknowingly working with glass and toxic fibres without a mask and as a result, suffered severe lung poisoning. She withdrew from school, and spent a desperately lonely year in a sanatorium, during which time, both of her parents died, leaving her totally isolated.
When she finally emerged from the sanatorium, she felt a determination to put her body at the centre of her art: using soft materials to create sculptures informed by her illness and long recovery. Now, her tantalisingly strange and surreal artwork blends fantasy with reality, body with machine, pleasure with pain, human with animal.
END
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