Supermodels?

or

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

“You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus, said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.”

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916

Susanne Junker’s current focus is the exploration of her artistic ambitions as a young woman in the 1990s. Her latest installation “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman” revisits the excitement, struggle and self-discovery along that path.

The portraiture of artists in their youth is a central theme of classical painting and literature. The tradition has been cultivated for generations – yet the contribution of women has for a long time remained marginal. Throughout history, female artists certainly existed but the male-dominated art world saw them as muses rather than legitimate artists.

In the 1990s, Susanne was working as a fashion model. It was the era of glamorous supermodels selling their perfect physical appearance. Those standards were set by the fashion industry and perpetuated the dominance of the male gaze in society.

Those rigid norms were unbearable, and they compelled Susanne to shift from object to author by becoming an artist. In opposition to the male gaze, she captured her unadorned self using an analogue camera, and took on different personas – expressing the authenticity of her anger, boredom and wittiness through her own created image. This conscious decision opened a long path to self-appropriation and recreation.

Within the risky process of self-portraiture, Susanne fearlessly questioned the bonds of family, tradition and religion – in order to reach independence from norms – while experiencing the joy and fulfilment of creating art. Such experiences too, were for long largely reserved to men.

Since Susanne has developed a large body of work of identity research, which continuously breaks established beauty codes, the female gaze has fully emerged as a field of artistic and academic research. Still, the story of female self-realisation is only starting to unfold.

Susanne Junker, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman” is a photo installation of 43 unpublished self-portraits of the series “Supermodels?”, 1995 - 2000, 30 cm x 20 cm, framed, printed on Hahnemühle archival paper.