PHOTOGRAPHY
His BodyIs A Language
YEAR2022
DEVELOPED FOR
Residency ‘H- The Notion of Humanist Photography’
FUNDED BY
Centre National de l’Audiovisuel, Dudelange, LU
MENTORS
MODELSTristan Bartolini, Ashwin Vinod
LIGHTINGAli Mohamed
SHOOT ASSISTANCECamille Bellmas
TEXTNandini Tripathy
FEATURED
The Body on Camera, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, 2024, Peckham 24 festival, 2023, Luxembourg Wort newspaper, 2023
What makes an individual attractive in a photograph? For both the individual and the spectator, it is most often a combination of physical attributes, grooming, and visual context. How a person looks, what they are wearing, how they are posing, and where they are located – all of these become broad brushstrokes that paint a picture that asks to be judged. It is a picture that tends to vary from region to region, and culture to culture, as witnessed in the dialectic between the profile images that follow, located in two cities situated more than 6,000 km apart – New Delhi, India and Geneva, Switzerland.
Capturing poses struck outdoors, at a gym, at a restaurant, and at a wedding, they focus in particular on the notion of attractive masculinity. They bear witness to how it is articulated differently against the two distinct socio-cultural backdrops, and how it is performative as much as it is internalised. In doing so, they ask you, the viewer, another question: How do you adjudge an individual attractive, based on a pose?
The research for this project uses a sample study of 126 profiles of cis-het men on the dating app Bumble, with 515 images analysed in total.
The profiles were sketched out, instead of taking screenshots, to avoid privacy and consent concerns.