Ever After (journal article)

For this special issue on the Visual Essay, Leister's photographs from the series ´Ever After´ were combined with texts from the work ´At a Glance´ (2008),

"For the last 10 years or more my work has been engaged with notions of faciality – looking, for instance, at the facial canvas in relation to the mocking or gaping mouth and the furrowed lines turning the eyes into expressive features. At the same time I see these works as an investigation into what the fleeting philosophies of portraying can mean when thinking outside the limitations of recording individual likeness. The project Ever After (2008) shown here, extends my earlier interest in the mouth and the photographic portrayal of laughing and smiling, now investigating the invisible features of love and kissing. Both projects engage with our physical boundaries and how we encounter ourselves in others, including the visual misrecognitions that actively involve us in the promises and failures of photographic representations. Placing the lips as a central but absent presence, I wanted these images to address the kiss as a hidden entity, concealed from the viewer by the very anatomy of both lovers’ faces. By tracing the shadow between their embracing profiles, the metaphorical structure of kissing and being kissed is turned into a gesture of exchange, desire or demand. Thus, the images try to tell us stories of a potential intimacy between giving and taking, at the same time playing with the unattainable features of love itself. For this issue the photographs from Ever After are combined with texts from the work At a Glance (2008), the latter depicting unfulfilled connections of the loving gaze in a both poetic and pathetic way: encouraging, missed or disjointed exchanges of smiles. Coming together in a contrasting visual narrative, the two works suggest an imaginary dialogue between text and image on the pages of the journal."

This was a special issue of the Journal for Visual Communication's 10th Anniversary.

Copyright Wiebke Leister, 2011.