Identity

Linn Underhill’s black-and-white portraits are based on the work of the well-known 1930s and '40s fashion and celebrity photographer George Platt Lynes.

Some of the images in Underhill’s “No Man’s Land” series of portraits and self-portraits in “DRAB” (dressed as a boy) directly mimic Lynes, who made elegant portraits of his friends and lovers.

“These included many of the heroes of my youth: artists and writers like E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Isamu Noguchi, Christopher Isherwood, Aaron Copland, Tennessee Williams, and Lincoln Kirstein,” said Underhill, who tries to “recreate the look of male privilege and glamour of that period. They also afford me the unique opportunity to validate my aging female body in an exhilarating act of masquerade.<

“‘No-man’s land’ is defined as an area of un-owned, unclaimed, or uninhabited land; or, in war, an area in a theater of operations not controlled by either side,” she said in explanation of her series title. “I propose gender as such a field, open to question and contention, owned absolutely by no one.”












Leigh Bowery, periferal in the notion of art practice by combining dandyism and body art, reconstructed his image while performing ‘Walk this Way’- a rendition of Run DMC’s remake of Aerosmith’s original that uses the expression of the ‘other’ to create a form of cultural lip-syncing transvestism. Copyright- Estate of Leigh Bowery, courtesy of Nicola Bowery and the archive of Dick Jewell.



The Seven Men Inside Katharine
http://anniesprinkle.org/past/7_men.html


TSENG Kwong Chi
http://www.tsengkwongchi.com/bio.html