book: Melanie Manchot Love Is a Stranger: Photographs1998-2001 (Photography)

book: Melanie Manchot Love Is a Stranger: Photographs1998-2001 (Photography) | Melanie Manchot, Germany) Fotogalerie in Der Alten Feuerwache (Mannheim ...

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	• Melanie Manchot Love Is a Stranger: Photographs1998-2001 (Photography) Melanie Manchot, Germany) Fotogalerie in Der Alten Feuerwache (Mannheim Prestel, 2001 - 95 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Wild and startling views of intimacy

Melanie Manchot uses the camera lens like a hard question and sensuous caress. It shows, despite what some of the over-written essay material by art critics contained in her book may assert, that her own ambivalence toward social norms along with her sense of the erotic are the source of her inspiration to produce stark, confrontational, yet paradoxically intimate photographs. Love is a Stranger, the title of the book, is really a kind of metaphore for what Manchot knows -that intimacy is overflowing everywhere among us, complicated and diverted not by the social rules restricting it but by our own questioning of our basic preference for intimacy when occasions for its display arise. The various series of photos in the book alternate between being inspiringly lush and formally restrained, all with a headlong deliberate sense of viewership that her particular use of the camera brings. In producing these photos and video documentations Manchot utilizes the photographic medium to engage some of the most fundamental human impulses, free them from fixed ideas of their proper or accepted understandings, and provide us with permission to consider human relations on a less unencumbered, interpersonal level. She is working inside certain aspects of just what it means to be human in a sensible way. This puts her work on aesthetic terrain that may seem obscure because the specifics of her objective, while so large in scope for being rather neglected in photography, focus with such precision on psychological truths that are largely a matter of rigorous introspection. This is an admirable collection of photographic work that speaks closely to our fundamental ideas about ourselves. It has both a reposing classic sense of artistic achievement and revelatory, cutting edge charisma.

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Melanie Manchot Love Is a Stranger Photographs

Edited by Klaus Honnef
With contributions by Janet Hand and Stuart Horodner

Whether playfully voyeuristic or deliberately ambivalent, Melanie Manchot ?s photographs never fail to elicit a reaction whether it be of amusement, unease or even disgust. Love is a Stranger presents six of the artist ?s most important recent series.