​"Rue Longchamp"
Series of 6 | Film photography | Medium format | 2011-2012

Is she naked or is she nude? Julie Wolsztynski’s alluring photograph reexamines this old dichotomy, made famous through John Berger’s seminal text, “Ways of Seeing”. In it, Berger distinguishes between representations of the “naked” as the body defined through representation self, and the “nude” as the body defined through representation of Other.  To be “nude” is to be a viewed object, while to be “naked” is to express oneself through one’s body. Julie’s photograph attempts to bridge this gap. The play of light and shadow over sensuous curves celebrates the body as an aesthetic thing of beauty. It is an object, or at least something physical. She has no face, or even a head; the most personally expressive part of the body is omitted. However, other elements in the photograph suggest that no matter how much a composition may urge the audience to view the body as an object for the benefit of their gaze, there is always an underlying humanity to the subject. The woman holds a book, a substitute symbol of a mind.  She therefore must have an internal life.  The artist continues this tension between the internal and external nature of the body by photographing the woman before a window. If the body is the external and the mind is the internal, then external is also what lies beyond the window and the internal is where the woman stands. Before this threshold, the woman appears in confident repose. The woman can be an object to gaze upon even as she herself gazes at the outside world and cultivates her own mind. Thus, what once seemed to be a clear dichotomy is now revealed to be a complicated system where the subject/object and internal/external realms can exist simultaneously in the same space. 
​Schuyler Krogh, Kenyon College 2015

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