Jill Barker's anthropomorphic photography
The curious effects of anamorphism have intrigued artists since antiquity. The process renders subjects in monstrously elongated perspective, so that only when they are viewed from a particular angle, do subjects assume normal proportions and become recognisable. The effect operates to deepen and complicate the reading of the work. Far from escaping into a window on the artist’s world, the spectator of the anamorphosis—or more precisely the participant—becomes a significant feature of the exchange.
Photographer Jill Barker places these demands on spectators of Face, a giant anamorphic photograph above Kelvin Grove Road outside QUT’s Creative Industries precinct. Barker’s Face blurs across the billboard site in a fuzzy trapezoid. The spectator is required to seize a slippery spot in the stream of traffic for the facial features to coalesce into a recognisable image. Thus the spectator is encouraged to self-consciously move through the process of viewing. This act of viewing is the flip side of the classical construction of vision. Cartesian perspective places the spectator at the node of a homolographic, mathematically coherent universe. Anamorphism perverts the process.
Plato described anamorphism as ‘Works which, when considered from a favorable viewing-point, resemble the beautiful but which, when properly examined, no longer offer the resemblance they promised’ (cited Baltrusaitis, 1977). Leonardo da Vinci explored and understood its curious effects in his Codex Atlanticus. Ghiberti, Alberti, later Baroque and Mannerist painters, delighted in mathematical play with the expectations of the spectator. The technique was cleverly deployed by Hans Holbein the Younger, and perhaps reached its zenith in the work of M.C. Esher.
In 1975 Paris hosted an important exhibition titled Anamorphoses: Games of Perception and Illusion in Art. Since then there