SOME/IMAGE : SANNE WOLTHAUS
“My body wants to be heard”
- Sanne Wolthaus.
In our current societal climate where the airbrushed versions of our personal lives have become translucent to all, Dutch photographer, Sanne Wolthaus’s photos provide a welcome antidote to bodies just wanting to be seen.
Her first collection of photographs entitled Mute, which she self-published after graduating from Amsterdam’s Photo Academy, is an attempt for her to break the silence of her daily life of chronic pain. In one photo the limbs of crooked trees gnarl against a backdrop of fire red suffering. In another, an animal carcass hangs, abandoned on meat hooks, a reminder of our own flesh and blood mortality, echoed by close ups of her own twisted torso and clavicle tensions. Her autobiographical works seek to help her understand her “body, pain and emotions better” as well as allow her to share her feelings both “physically and emotionally and attempt to make a connection with other people”
After studying under French photographer Antoine D’Agata in Tbilisi, Georgia, Wolthaus’s latest project Prey continues in a similar vein to her earlier work, exploring her “inner urges, impulses, discomfort and pain.” Like D’Agata her work interrogates human decay and the rawness of our physicalness. The photos juxtapose bald landscapes with her own nudes, as she plays with “acting like a hunter”, searching determinedly with her lens to articulate her emotive states, but essentially being their subject and therefore remaining as “the prey”
www.sannewolthaus.com
Text by Shana Chandra | S/TUDIO