Strength is immortalized in the
portraits of artist and photographer Vee Spears. Spears is an Australian artist
utilizes renowned symbols of strength that border on the fantastic when
contrasted with the soft adolescence of her youthful subjects in the collection
“Bulletproof.” She chooses the background her subjects in a cracked and grungy
white drop. Her aperture projects a relatively shallow depth of field and her
shutter speed need not be quick as she is not seeking to capture movement. The
quality of her images is high as every detail of her subjects is shown. Her
viewer gets to witness the shocking peculiarity of her unusual subjects in
their even more unusual wardrobe.
Youth is paralleled with strength
in this series. Young boys in armor and boxing gloves prepared for battle,
girls with bows and rifles ready for the hunt are only a few examples of the
violent notions conveyed by her imagery. Spears wants the viewer to be shocked
and a little terrified by these children. The image of these children as innocent
and pure is tainted by their seemingly apparent knowledge of the battles that
lie ahead of them when they take their first steps into adulthood. The
frightening point to this collection is how early these children will need to
begin to defend themselves from it.
I can
appreciate the more creative representations of strength in these works such as
the replacement of arms with bison horns but aside from that the use of guns
and masks seems cliché and distracting from her message. In truth, I don’t need
the cliché notion of seeing a child with a gun to get the idea that these
children will need to defend their lives even at such a young age. Otherwise,
these images are beautiful and creative showing a style that I would not mind
emulating extensively.
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