If The Power Issue were to have a cover, it’d be Philadelphia-based photographer CM Eckenrode‘s “Hands Closed”. Looking at the picture, it seems as if the subject has been violently restrained. Taken with the title, however, one gets the impression that the constriction’s self-inflicted. True explanation remains a mystery, much like the definition of power.
It may help to know, however, that Eckenrode’s work revolves around his coming out period. Like another We Want Your Art contributor, namely Eric Sizemore, Eckenrode’s images address the struggle between exterior and interior control, exploring the contradictory dynamics of self-acceptance. While most of the coming out series, appropriately called “Untied”, takes place in shadows, the final image explodes with blinding light. Still, the male figure (Eckenrode) hugs his naked body, curled up as if waiting for attack. While he’s escaped the straps of the closet, new power struggles await.
If you think “Hands Closed” speaks loudly, head on over to Eckenrode’s website to see the 33-year old artist’s new series, in which he reconstructs the body through layered and pieced together images.
dante
ABSOLUTELY!!!! HIS SH#T ROCKS!!!!! IT IS UNSPEAKABLELY BEAUTIFUL, STRONG, COMPLETELY ENTRANCING AND LIKE NOTHING ELSE I’VE EVER SEEN!!!!!!!
Bruce
I believe that the imagery is of a standard iconography concerning gayness and coming out. Gay love traditionally is subject to dark places – so I find the contextualization to be accurate. Today is a time when political forces when combined with the media demonize and sexualize youth, and for the most part this is the only form of dialogic expression that young people voice in our postmodern consumerist driven world. I do question if this imagery allows gay folk and lesbians to experience themselves in a more positive visual positioning given our American popular culture. It is my feeling that gay and lesbian people need a critical and productive way to construe a sense of identity, agency, and affirming positive popular representations. It is my opinion we need to include gritty issues like race and the hatred of old age in American gay culture, for all aspects of being gay needs serious portrayal if we wish to shift the forces of established power and bigotry away from a voyeuristic felicitation of the young white human body. How does this work advance the notion of white angst, or racial politics, and do we continue to express an emphatic indifference in our art expression to politics in general? One cannot avoid the connection to accountability of slavery, lynching, discrimination, and other heinous acts given the unavoidable outlook of such imagery and appropriation.