Writer, photographer, film-maker, and soon-to-be Berliner Waty is strickingly Jacques Brel meets Jean-Paul Belmondo, or maybe it’s just the eternal leather jacket appeal thing. He tells me his work revolves around three cornerstones of our existence: Sex, time and death. How very Baudelaire of him.
His identity series struck me as particularly poignant in this light. I could not help but feel unease, the discomfort of “etre mal dans sa peau”. These plural, transexual faces, vulnerable, questioning, embody a certain disquiet and strike taboo: looking at sex and death in our judgement of beauty, especially in facial features, is linked to subconscious imperatives of reproduction. Is there not, then, a self-effacement in these portraits? He seems to say “these are me” and yet “these are not me” and again “are these me?”, “where am I?”, “where are they?”, who are we? I am not sure whether these faces are denying their identity, provoking it, blurring some crucial evidence, or just playing with me – but they definitely embody a question mark that I identify with.
They bring to mind one of my favourite poems by Fernando Pessoa. You can read it here.
More on Waty in December then!
Filed under: photography
