Guia Besana

In the last 35 years biodiversity has declined by more than a quarter due to population growth and our consumption. Overexploitation is currently unsustainable and habitat destruction is causing decrease in species. Adding to the complexity of this problem is climate change.

This is a fact and it is also a fact that this current situation in one for which one species – ours – appears to be responsible.

Performed by feminine figures, POISON illustrates with a series of images the journey of my mind entering and exiting some of the themes, which represent this concern. In solitary whereabouts these women find themselves inside scenes of accomplished destruction and corruption or candidly define the inevitable consequence.

Addressing environmental issues in their diversity is not an easy task, taken the scale of the topic. One might take for granted the global awareness regarding the destruction of biodiversity as a consequence of human activities, yet, in our daily lives, we all have to face situations that leave us powerless, or which we choose to ignore. This very feeling of helplessness is the starting point of my series “Poison”, born from my need to give a form to the questionings we all have to deal with, day after day.

For my previous series, I used feminine figures to embody emotions linked to maternity and femininity. I quite naturally kept the same process for my new work dedicated to the problem of environment destruction. Of course because I'm a woman, and I can identify directly to these figures, but also because women, as they give life, offer a more striking contrast with the destruction scenes I depict in my pictures. With these very precise compositions, complex enough to raise different ideas, I allow different interpretations. This involvement of the viewer is essential to me, as it initiates a personal reflexion, making way to a deeper questioning of our behavior towards the emergency of environmental issues.

Through a suite of 10 large-scale photographs Under Pressure illustrates women playing endless parts in our unstable society which persistently solicits us with contradictory messages. Women are directed to represent or translate, into a mise-en-scène, a specific conflicting theme: burn-out, marriage, ideal love, search for happiness, relationship with its own body, technology …

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures" Ralph Waldo Emerson

Subjects dealing with women identity have always drawn my attention. Treating themes I relate to make it possible for me to go unintentionally in depth. Becoming a mother and facing new emotions led me to a different kind of visual narration to describe what is true and I thought that illustrating the complex experience of pregnancy and motherhood was worth to be translated into a photographic work.

This series, titled “Baby Blues”, explores the emotional and fragile world women encounter during motherhood through a process of staging and symbolic representation of truth.  It might sound like a paradox but I believe that constructing an image from an inner vision can be as honest as recording it from real life. It is another way of showing something others can relate to, respecting a distance but demanding questioning.

I began using a large format camera to stage and recreate images where the subject is a mother in a very specific state of mind seizing the tension between what seems like an obvious circumstance and a deeper implication. The purpose of this series is to preserve the emotional experience that becoming a mother entails.

In “Baby Blues” women are like frozen in a different time, far from what is happening around them, they look as if they were forgotten in a scene. These representations of female introspection are contemporary portraits resulting from themes such as fear, loss, identity, isolation, fusion and separation from one’s children and fleeting childhood memory that recurs...