staged bodies
group show
These six brut photographers share a common approach: they conceive of the body as a stage for intimacy, transgression, and obsession. These staged bodies — transformed, fetishized, sutured — free themselves from aesthetic and moral norms, shaped instead by desire, impulse, and the need to exist otherwise.
Since each print is unique, these images emanate what Walter Benjamin described as the “aura” of a work of art.
These photographers project onto the body a mental fiction in which photography no longer merely documents: it acts, reenacts, and displaces reality.
Tomasz Machciński (1942–2022) pursued an unrelenting fifty-year quest for identity through more than 22,000 self-portraits, embodying a multitude of personas, both male and female. Meanwhile, Lubŏs Plný (born 1961) transforms his own body into an experimental field — through stitching, collage, incisions, and scars — gestures of reinvention and self-knowledge that probe his physical and existential limits.
Jorge Alberto Cadi (born 1963) fragments and reassembles salvaged photographs, sewing them together to conjure hybrid, mystical, and ambiguous bodies, whereas Miroslav Tichý (1926–2011), with his makeshift camera, secretly glorifies the women he encounters on the street, constructing a world of desire and distance.
The Anonymous Fetishist (active between 1996 and 2006) explores, through his images, a fascination with legs clad in stockings — sometimes even donning them himself.
John Kayser (1922–2007), for his part, experimented through his staged compositions with a jubilant and irreverent eroticism, in playful complicity with his models.
