Emma Bee Bernstein: Fetishism of Fashion and Vintage Self-portraits

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Published: Dec 20, 2022
Keywords:
synthesis journal comparative literary studies comparative literature Francesca Woodman Emma Bee Bernstein nostalgia self-portrait
Daniele Pomilio
Abstract



This essay discusses the self-portraits of Emma Bee Bernstein as an instance of the “Crisis of the Real” that Andy Grundberg detected in contemporary photography (1999). Her creations have a transformative power very distant from the realistic vocation of the photographic medium. Emma Bernstein’s work shows a great fascination with vintage décor and discarded items which she adopts as costumes in the masquerades in which she involves her girlfriends. This aesthetic recalls the one originated from decaying Roman halls in Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits, in another dreamy adventure of a fugitive self. However, Emma Bernstein’s recovery of these objets trouvés is also an exploration of the progressive legacy of her family, in a body of work that critically confronts the commodified and disaffected surfaces of fashion shows that tend to neutralise the personal and feminist motives of her art.




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Author Biography
Daniele Pomilio

Daniele Pomilio is a graduate in multimedia arts, and is the author of of a monograph on videogame design. He has recently writtenon Germano Celant's exhibits of performance artists in Venice, on Jim Jarmusch's relation to the New York Poets and on Sylvia Plath’s radiodrama inspired by a Bergman film on birth. He is currently creating an interactive application using pictorial art techniques in order to beautify a visual domain that is often not art-conscious enough.

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