Susanne Leibold

Tecnica: Cyanotype: a combination of found material (magazines), photograms (hair accessories and equipment) and digital negatives (hair).

Anno: ND

Dimensione: ND

Descrizione: This work deals with found image material and examines its transformation through artistic intervention. The starting point is advertisements from a magazine from 1987 that focus on hair and hair care. These advertisements function not only as image carriers, but also as cultural documents of a specific ideal of beauty and body image. By transferring them to the analogue process of cyanotype, they are removed from their original commercial context and renegotiated. My own intervention remains tied to the theme of hair in terms of content. Based on various photographs of hair, digital negatives were created that function as an interface between digital image production and analogue printing processes. The motifs used range from microscopic images of my own hair to formalised, radially arranged hair structures. These are supplemented by photograms of hair-specific tools such as combs, scissors, hair clips and hairpins, which, as functional objects, also refer to practices of care, control and styling. Hair is an ambivalent part of the body: biologically self-evident, culturally highly coded. It functions as a carrier of identity, belonging and difference. Length, colour and structure refer to cultural influences, social norms and individual decisions. At the same time, hair is a place of memory and projection – it grows back, can be changed, removed or styled, and yet eludes complete control. In the context of advertising, hair becomes a projection surface for promises of optimisation. Hair care products appear not as functional commodities, but as carriers of a timeless ideal of beauty. They address the longing for youth, perfection and immortality, reproducing a dream that has hardly changed historically. By combining historical advertising images with a reductive, chemical printing process, this supposed timelessness is made visible and at the same time questioned.