honorable mention
Aliocha Merker italy
title
Divine Cracks
as her whole: life generator/object of male desire/regent of the universal order.
After a difficult personal event I needed to get back in touch with my masculine side and confront my torn relation to
women (mother, ex-wife, lovers…); to do so I simply had to get close to the mystery of womanhood, chasing my very
own vision of Courbet’s “Origine du Monde”. I started by reprinting an old negative of an ex-girlfriend of mine, pushing
the contrast and exposure to the limit. The result I got I thought was extraordinary in its abstractness: an image that
was at the same time eerily erotic and confusely evocative. I decided I would need to take this experiment further and
turn it into a project.
I realised that the strong contrast of the print together with the detail of the framing generates an abstraction of the
human body, almost as if it were the marble statue of a classical “divinity”. The anatomic detail would be subtly
revealed within the black of the line confining the erotic tension to an almost subconscious level. The result forms a
“crack” (inspired by Lucio Fontana’s revolutionary cuts) in the white idyll of the paper that shatters all certainties of
the male universe, a slight discomfort, a faint embarassment... the photographic medium reminds the viewer that
everything is real, attainable, earthly yet uncanny. In the end every single image takes a life of its own, mutating into
anything anyone sees in it.
The images don’t bear names, only numbers, making all the subjects equivalent, at the same time different from one
another, thus sanctioning the uniqueness of each and every woman.
Death metal drummer in the 80’s.
Works in the italian movie industry and studies photography at ICP in New York in the 90’s.
Fine Art, set photographer, portraits, food, architecture photographer and videocameraman since the
00’s.
Personal and group shows internationally since 1997.
Director of photography for the documentary “HN-Hermann Nitsch (Best Documentary Audience Award,
Beverly Hills Film Festival 2011).
Set photographer for the features “The Black Brothers” (2012) and “Schellen Ursli” (currently in
production) by Academy Award winner Xavier Koller.
back to gallery
entry description
“Divine Cracks” represents the idealisation of the feminine essence as the source of creative rebirth, an ode to womanas her whole: life generator/object of male desire/regent of the universal order.
After a difficult personal event I needed to get back in touch with my masculine side and confront my torn relation to
women (mother, ex-wife, lovers…); to do so I simply had to get close to the mystery of womanhood, chasing my very
own vision of Courbet’s “Origine du Monde”. I started by reprinting an old negative of an ex-girlfriend of mine, pushing
the contrast and exposure to the limit. The result I got I thought was extraordinary in its abstractness: an image that
was at the same time eerily erotic and confusely evocative. I decided I would need to take this experiment further and
turn it into a project.
I realised that the strong contrast of the print together with the detail of the framing generates an abstraction of the
human body, almost as if it were the marble statue of a classical “divinity”. The anatomic detail would be subtly
revealed within the black of the line confining the erotic tension to an almost subconscious level. The result forms a
“crack” (inspired by Lucio Fontana’s revolutionary cuts) in the white idyll of the paper that shatters all certainties of
the male universe, a slight discomfort, a faint embarassment... the photographic medium reminds the viewer that
everything is real, attainable, earthly yet uncanny. In the end every single image takes a life of its own, mutating into
anything anyone sees in it.
The images don’t bear names, only numbers, making all the subjects equivalent, at the same time different from one
another, thus sanctioning the uniqueness of each and every woman.
about the photographer
Born and raised in Switzerland in the 70’s.Death metal drummer in the 80’s.
Works in the italian movie industry and studies photography at ICP in New York in the 90’s.
Fine Art, set photographer, portraits, food, architecture photographer and videocameraman since the
00’s.
Personal and group shows internationally since 1997.
Director of photography for the documentary “HN-Hermann Nitsch (Best Documentary Audience Award,
Beverly Hills Film Festival 2011).
Set photographer for the features “The Black Brothers” (2012) and “Schellen Ursli” (currently in
production) by Academy Award winner Xavier Koller.
back to gallery