Practitioner - Bruno Metra and Laurence Jeanson

As a curator for the ID festival, one of the practitioners chosen to show in the festival are French photographers Bruno Metra and Laurence Jeanson. They are collectively known as Metra-Jeanson. The particular work chosen is named ID. They cut out facial features from magazine editorials that are heavily done with make up taped them over models' faces to cover parts of their won faces. They then photographed their models, both men and women, wearing these partial masks. They wanted to focus on how they ‘disconnect between the edited faces and actual human features’.  These images show how models in the industry today are made up so dramatically to look perfect and photo shopped to improve their appearance on the front of a magazine. They talk about how they feel we are bombarded by images of others in the media, whom we try to compare ourselves to.

They say how ‘the act of representation seems to have taken over what is real. The edit is what counts most. And so models erase themselves in order to gain another self.’

The series of images in the ID collection are quite disturbing. With the different facial features placed on the models making them look unreal and altered. The idea behind our festival is to show different peoples identities and personalities. This group of work almost masks the models identity, and adds someone else’s. They will work well within the festival as this work shows how others may think they want to be seen, and maybe change their own identities to fit into society. They are portraying the models identities but slightly changing there over all appearance in a very obvious way. They are showing each of the models becoming another person by masking her own image and identity. These images work well with the rest of the practitioners work, as they are also portraits. They are all done in a plain white background that draws all the attention to the model. The models faces have been transformed in a way that takes a hard look at our identity, but they can still be seen behind the paper over laid images. I like this concept and feel it will work well in our festival.

Metra and Jeanson talk about how they believe that; ‘We are fascinated by the power of media to influence people's identities.’