I saw Perttu Saksa’s completely stunning and a bit disturbing series, A Kind of You, floating around the internet, and when I went to the artist’s website, I found something I liked even more. Echo is a group of incredibly gorgeous photos of “taxidermic primates, captured into European museum archives from colonial Africa and Latin America.” I’ve never been particularly partial to primates or images of them, but I really love everything about these pictures and it was so hard to narrow it down to the ten I am sharing today. The cracked hands, the foggy eyes, the darkness, the sheer fragility. I think this series is truly beautiful.
From the artist’s statement: The ways of seeing and reading these posing animals have many layers – historically, scientifically, culturally, linguistically and esthetically. “Echo” questions how our histories are written and represented through photography and natural science. These different ways and possibilities of investigating the pictures make them more alive and interesting, not only to be tied to one specific interpretation of nature, rather about human condition, ways of writing history and relating on ourselves.
From “Echo”
Visit artist's site: perttusaksa.com
Posted November 11th, 2013
