SPLITS IN PERFECTION: SPLIT DRIFT
Luca Bass’ series Split Drift asks what happens to a body once the camera has reshaped it enough times. Sakshi Patil attended the night and dives into the visual world of this emerging image maker.
The Zurich-born, London-based photographer — on the Fashion Communication: Image & Photography MA at Central Saint Martins — built his ten-image series around a close friend’s struggle with body image. The friend, a winner of the Elite Model Look competition and the model starring in the images themselves, was privately dealing with body dysmorphia and depression. Bass wanted to hold the gap between the friend’s flawless public image and the harder self underneath it.
The two works chosen for Subsurface, the exhibition in which Bass’ works were held within, break the body into parts; with the model caught mid-fragment, beauty and distortion pressed together with neither giving way.
Bass too is well-versed in the world of modelling, so he knows the split from the inside-out. “Imagine you see yourself kind of on a billboard or on a commercial and you look perfect and then you see yourself hungover on a Sunday morning,” he says to me as we chat amid the art.
For him, this isn’t only about him and his pal. He saw the same thing in Milan and Paris: “There are these young people, and you would feel they would be so confident, and most of them are so insecure about their looks or about jobs.” Anyone who spends time on Instagram knows the version, the polished, filtered self you measure yourself against, whether or not you’ve ever stood in front of a professional camera.
The show sits in a crypt, and the space, in a way, does some of the work itself. Bass was drawn to its flaws, and to the fact that people are buried beneath the floor. The rawness matches a series that won’t resolve the body, or the self, into anything finished.
The two prints hang on opposite walls of a narrow corridor, so you can’t take them in together. You face one, then turn your back on it to reach the other. The viewing is deliberately awkward and exposed, putting the disconnection Bass is describing into your own body.
Split Drift doesn’t tie off either. The body stays in pieces, and so does the version of yourself you think you’re supposed to be after standing for a while, taking it all in.
Split Drift is on view as part of Subsurface at The Crypt Gallery, Euston Road, London, 1–3 August. Archival pigment prints by Luca Bass, who is completing an MA in Fashion Communication: Image & Photography at Central Saint Martins.
