Gratuitous Sex and Violence – My Favourites
The pictures in the book are more like gratuitous surrealist sex
and gratuitous surrealist violence. Even in a picture of a woman
with butterflies attached to her back, that appears beautiful
at first glance, you soon realise that they are pinned to her
with needles and below are their Latin names. Pinned there by
some perverse collector, perhaps.
The pictures are like troubling scenes from movies and have an
uneasy sense of tension. They are scenes that are filmic and suggest
narrative.
Alva Bernadine’s incomparable photographic signature is quite
unique. His work combines elements of surrealism and erotic photography
with humour. These photographs — be they in color or in black
and white - are astounding, provocative and compelling.
Bernadine’s photographic world is way out, incredible funny at
times, disturbing at others. Its compositional strength and colour
intensity always constitute a visual happening, or as Alva Bernadine
himself puts it: “I take the theatricality of surrealism, the
elegance of classical haute couture photography, the narrative
of reportage and the refinements of advertising photography and
mix them all into a ‘Bernadinian cocktail’ — a radical photographic
synthesis.”
Bernadine’s photographs can be read at two levels: on the surface,
a feast for the eyes, below that, a wealth of sublime, ironic,
sometimes provocative allusion. After the initial shock — maybe
even the first burst of laughter — the spectator discovers the
photographs’ narrative quality, unfolding between careful mise-en-scène
and distorted alienation. Latex-clad women in their fitted-kitchens,
manipulated female bodies with two lower or upper torsos — these
are stories from the subculture of male fantasy, defused somewhat
by self-mocking exaggeration and surreal form, though without
losing anything of their provocative and pugnacious quality .
