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15/11/2009

Alvin Booth

Galerie Acte2, Paris

In "Anamorphosis", Booth plays another game; he hides the naked body by multiplying it. The concrete body becomes an abstract pattern, it disappears and loses individuality but in doing so limbs and genitalia become strange and brand new, in the way that words do when they are repeated over and over again. The camera creates dynamics out of stillness, frozen explosions that can be seen as inversions of Edward Muybridge's motion capture. In these photographs, the nudes vanish in recursion; turning into giant kaleidoscopic flesh flowers, into organic visigothic zig zags, into eroticized Escher tessellations. Welcome to Alvin Booth's deep surfaces.

Fingerprints
Photographs capture the real and then improve upon it. We over-know this; too used to this easy visual alchemy. In our image-saturated culture eyes die of boredom, they see but cannot touch. When we look at something we do want to touch, our eyes saccade over the surface the way a finger or hand would, betraying our longing for a secret, extra-long controllable eyelash.

Here Alvin Booth shows us that we can still be surprised by both the photographic medium and by the human body. With "Fingerprints", he offers us photographs that consent to being touched - we are provided with body Braille. Studies have shown that the visual cortex is activated when the blind read Braille with their fingertips. Here we can imagine the opposite - our sensory cortex being activated as we look at haptically enhanced images of nudes. The images suggest evolution's next stage, coolly engineered epithelium as information. Booth asks us to contemplate his photographs with our eyes closed - a perverse request that we gladly grant.

John W. Krakauer
Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience
Columbia University New York

Image: Anamorphosis / Fingerprints

Galerie acte2
41 rue d'Artois, 75008 Paris
Opening hours: Mon-Fri 10am-7pm, Sat 12-6pm

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