"Loretta Lux makes pictures of children that are as charming as they are creepy—a sweet-and-sour combo that proves surprisingly hard to resist, even if you suspect the work is little more than kitsch of the most sophisticated and unnerving sort. Like Rineke Dijkstra crossed with Margaret Keane, Lux turns ordinary children into alluring aliens—icons of innocence so tainted by experience (or maybe just curdled nostalgia) they already feel antique. Because the work is strangely unmoored in place or time—drifting off into the idyllic past while hinting at a vacuous, sci-fi future—it manages to conflate memory and dread, sweetness and blight, in a dreamscape whose specificity reads as utterly imaginary.
Maybe that's because it is. As with so much contemporary photography, nothing here is quite what it seems. Lux, 34, studied painting in Munich before switching to photography in 1999, but she actually works between the two media and generates the final results by computer. Her images are seamless amalgams of two different photographs—the figure and the background—that she enhances digitally with a program whose tools are probably closer to a retoucher's than a painter's but allow Lux to pursue her original training in a new form. The children, all the sons and daughters of friends, many of whom, Lux says, "remind me of my own childhood or the friends I had when I was little," are photographed against a white wall in a studio. Most of the settings, which include abandoned buildings, grassy fields, and a pebbly beach, begin as photos taken on travels throughout Europe. Whatever the original source, it's reworked in the computer until it has the sublime sheen of reality perfected, telling imperfection and all....."
taken from Vince Aletti's review found on the website: http://www.lorettalux.de/
1 Comments:
"Loretta Lux makes pictures of children that are as charming as they are creepy—a sweet-and-sour combo that proves surprisingly hard to resist, even if you suspect the work is little more than kitsch of the most sophisticated and unnerving sort. Like Rineke Dijkstra crossed with Margaret Keane, Lux turns ordinary children into alluring aliens—icons of innocence so tainted by experience (or maybe just curdled nostalgia) they already feel antique. Because the work is strangely unmoored in place or time—drifting off into the idyllic past while hinting at a vacuous, sci-fi future—it manages to conflate memory and dread, sweetness and blight, in a dreamscape whose specificity reads as utterly imaginary.
Maybe that's because it is. As with so much contemporary photography, nothing here is quite what it seems. Lux, 34, studied painting in Munich before switching to photography in 1999, but she actually works between the two media and generates the final results by computer. Her images are seamless amalgams of two different photographs—the figure and the background—that she enhances digitally with a program whose tools are probably closer to a retoucher's than a painter's but allow Lux to pursue her original training in a new form. The children, all the sons and daughters of friends, many of whom, Lux says, "remind me of my own childhood or the friends I had when I was little," are photographed against a white wall in a studio. Most of the settings, which include abandoned buildings, grassy fields, and a pebbly beach, begin as photos taken on travels throughout Europe. Whatever the original source, it's reworked in the computer until it has the sublime sheen of reality perfected, telling imperfection and all....."
taken from Vince Aletti's review found on the website: http://www.lorettalux.de/
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