The Running Horse

Photography portraiture has long been a practice of peering at the other, some might say voyeuristically through the photographer’s lens by the photographer and the viewers, privileging a subject, a moment, an experience of the sitter - an attempt at immortality.

In her latest series Between 11 and noon, Kahil takes this practice to fix in time and space a yearning for her idealised male. This male emerges from the series a composite object of these seven portraits. Alex, Erwan, Mark, Mattias, Maxime, Ronnie and Xavier share the desired traits of the archetype: same physical type, and temperament, the tousled hair, unshaven face and tattoos… The desire, never culminating in a real resolution, is conceived by the artist to become a physical appropriation of these men through her photographic practice.

The artist confronts herself and the “object” of her desire with her infatuation without allowing “it” to actively play a part. It is a controlled scenario where she imposes a meeting in her studio – between 11 and noon – and captures what these men represent to her, thus giving rise to a certain vulnerability in the sitter.

These conditions and her practice offer an outlet for her fantasy, becoming almost an excuse to experience contact with the men, without the fulfillment of it. The artist enjoys looking at them from a distance, with the clinical set and her camera separating her from any involvement.

Thus, despite her desire, the portraits are detached, like those of fashion photography, with the allure of surface beauty, blurring the individual identities of the men and leaving them objectified and trivialised by the photographic process. And yet, there is a touching casual intimacy in these images, and a pleasure derived by the men from being watched, admired and photographed.

This seemingly detached, almost sexist portrayal is accompanied by an extremely candid account of the artist’s encounters with the object of desire. It restores to the portraits the individual traits that the photographic process has stripped them of. By the same token, these “confessions”, devoid of any cynicism, reveal a telling vulnerability in the artist herself.

This striking duality of the impressions of the sitter that come through the photography on the one hand (objectified, serialised) and the voice-over on the other (personal, intimate) reveal more of the artist than of the men. This series is first and foremost about the artist: what part of the artist is revealed through the portrayal of the other? And how does seriality undermine the artist’s paragon?

What makes a photographer choose particular people for a series?

Tattoos, facial hair, the marks of my edit. It was unconscious. 

When I embarked on this project, I only loosely knew that I wanted to shoot boys that sparked something in me, a longing maybe. They had stubble on their face, they had tattoos, visible gumlines when they smiled and a certain aloofness in their eyes. They were only a handful, but I realized that they all bore the marks of what I longed for in the opposite sex. They represented the fantasy of the Other, the Boy that I wanted to be mine. 

I made them come to my house on a light grey morning, and strip for my lens. And while their eyes were turned elsewhere, I could scrutinize liberally. And then 20 minutes later, they left my makeshift home studio, but I had their image forever.

                                                                                                                                                                                     Rasha Kahil