Читать книгу I Write Artist Statements - Liz Sales - Страница 13

Vlad the Impaler

Vlad the Impaler (b. 1431, Sighişoara, Transylvania) is an artist who mainly works with photography. By employing flat formal solutions, his photography has a distinct lack of visual drama in a way that echoes his undead soul. In turn, the image approaches an objective gaze where the subject, rather than the photographer’s perspective on it, is paramount.

The Impaler’s images are flattened out, formally and dramatically, in the manner of the typologies and straight photography espoused by his teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Impaler’s best-known project is Mina, a series of 60 frontal, identically framed photographs of Wilhelmina Harker, the reincarnation of the artist’s centuries-dead wife, Elisabeta, staring deadpan into the camera. As a lifeless monster, he does not believe in psychological portrait photography the way his colleagues do. He is not trying to capture the character of his subject. He believes he can only show the surface; everything beyond that is up to the viewer.

Due to his interest in reincarnation, authenticity and appropriation are of recurring interest to the Impaler. He further explored these ideas in Bran Castle, a photographic collection of portraits of the artist’s childhood home and other Transylvanian castles, all taken from the same angle with the light evenly distributed, and printed in identical size. The intense and obsessive nature of the Impaler’s project mirrors the soulless order of industrial production, a phenomenon that greatly altered the 500-year-old vampire’s world and worldview. Vlad the Impaler currently lives and works in Tampa, Florida.