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subscribe to style file blog via RSSmelanie pullen’s terrible beauty
October 13, 2008 9:46 am
Melanie Pullen doesn’t go for lightweight imagery. The L.A.-based photographer’s first major series, High Fashion Crime Scenes, took its inspiration from the work of midcentury NYPD photographers—the shutterbugs charged with recording the city’s murders, mob hits, and suicides. Using models and designer clothes, she re-created these images as a cutting commentary on violence and glamour. Now Pullen has turned her eye to another violent and glamorous undertaking: war. In Violent Times, a collection of 95 large-scale lightboxes and photographic prints, she takes the time-honored approach of sweetening the horrors of war—the dulce et decorum effect—and recasts it for the post-terrorism era. Here, she talks to Style.com about the desensitizing affects of brutality, the allure of a man in uniform, and why male models make the best soldiers.
So first you covered murder; now you’re on to war. What is it about violence that draws you?
When I was doing research for High Fashion Crime Scenes, I kept coming across war images. The more I became desensitized to the crime photos, the more the war photos horrified me. So I started looking in those, into how war has historically been depicted. And what I learned was that, historically, war images are totally unreal—they’re basically propaganda. If you look at paintings of war scenes, they’re very cinematic, which is not at all the way war is. Another side effect of working on this series is that I completely stopped watching television—the news drives me nuts.
What’s the fashion connection?
I was really struck by how stylized some of this imagery is, especially the older, pre-twentieth-century stuff. When you look at how these guys dressed up to fight a battle, it’s pretty incredible. They look like peacocks going to war. It reminded me of the suicide photos that I found when I was doing High Fashion Crime Scenes; the suicides always put on their best outfits before they killed themselves. Even cavemen put on makeup before going to war. Maybe it’s about how you’re going to be remembered, trying to manipulate that image. For war, especially, it was something that was planned out.
Waging war has traditionally been a high-status undertaking, so it would make sense that anyone engaged in it would be nicely kitted out.
Yes! The glamour and glorification of war. The uniforms, which are almost feminine because they’re so gorgeous, kind of hide how gruesome the imagery is. And, you know, war painters would hire male models to pose for them. When I first started working on the series, we’d get these thirty-something guys to pose and the images would come back and they just wouldn’t be iconic enough. I realized I needed male models, too. The paintings we’re used to of war all feature good-looking men. It was almost laughable the first time we got them in—things just clicked.
The Derek Zoolander-fication of war! Were you conscious of deliberately glamorizing war?
Yeah, that was the point: to show how glam we’ve made it over time.
And of course the whole time you were working on the series, the U.S. has been at war.
That made it really timely. A lot of artists are dealing with the subject now, but the representations tend to be ugly. I thought it was interesting—for me, at least—to show how we’ve stylized and sanitized it.
Do people realize that?
You don’t want to spell everything out for people. Some people definitely don’t get it. But then, a lot of people didn’t get my last series. Some people just think the work is beautiful and don’t look beyond that. But people who really do get it—and I’ve been told that people who go to the exhibit very often go back—that’s very satisfying.
Violent Times is on display at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, through January 2009.
tags: High Fashion Crime Scenes, Melanie Pullen, Violent Times
