PORTRAIT
Connie Imboden is ambiguity. Beyond the eccentric sexagenarian with natural white hair who posts photos of her parachuting, her work is enigmatic and obscure. Connie is an American photographer born in 1953 who lives and works in Baltimore as an art professor at Notre Dame University. She has organized workshops in New York, at the Rencontres dArles, in the Czech Republic and in the United Arab Emirates. Connie is presented in many permanent collections, notably at the MoMa in New York or the BNF in Paris, as well as many other public and private collections across Europe, America and more recently China. In 1992, she was considered the great discovery of the month of photography in Paris. Part of his work consists of photos of bodies or parts of naked bodies, immersed or completely immersed in water, a basin of water painted black and covered with mirrors with a play on reflections, reflections, which distorts and reshapes the body, a surreal body distortion, opening the way to new points of view and a new aspect of the original physique. She finds her inspiration in the alchemy of water and light, reflection and the submerged naked body. His images have the power to shock, surprise, and repel. It is a whole metaphorical poetry on the body and the face, like an investigation on the human condition. There is a tragic and romantic, reverential and ostentatious calm. With this staging, the eye is disturbed, just like the water, and you are no longer certain of what you are seeing.
The images come to life when she lets her mind escape, when she is no longer guided only by the perception of her eyes, guided by the poetry of the world around her. Suddenly, the spectator is generally amazed, not only by this visual beauty and this sincerity, but also by this complex deformation of our mind. And even if the doors are left open to all kinds of interpretations, his work remains metaphorical and poetic. The sky above the models is dark, like the bottom of the pool below them. The black coincides with the psychological depth and darkness of his work, like an echo.
- Find the continuation of Connie Imboden inNormal Magazine No. 4-