Frozen Movement
A conversation with photographer, acrobat and movement designer Isabelle Wenzel
Image Courtesy: Isabelle Wenzel
Our movements are rooted in our experiences as social beings. From the way our tongue moves when we speak and the way our bodies interact with one another, to the mannerisms that create our personalities. Our bodies are constantly changing and the way they move is affected by our interaction with people.
Isabelle Wenzel has made a name for herself within the photography - and acrobatic - community for capturing remarkable and distorted poses of the physical body. We were intrigued by the visual complexity of her images and the meaning behind them.
In a conversation with her, she told us all about her spontaneous creative process, sources of inspiration, her latest series Until Further Notice, and what the future looks like for her work.
You describe yourself as a movement designer, what does that mean?
Good question, I think there are a lot of definitions for it. Movement designers can develop moving images or create performances but in my case I use the term because I design movement for my camera. I understand my way of working and my style of photography as the body is articulating an image. The base of my work is photography and my movements are the foundation of it. It is quite difficult to put into words, it just feels that my body intuitively knows when a picture is being taken. Most of the time there is no eye behind the camera because I use a self-release feature and I run to capture the image. The camera works as a mechanical aid of what is happening.
What’s your creative process like? I feel your images always tell a deeper story.
Everything is very intuitive, trial and error is a huge part of my creativity. It is all about the process of trying out. In certain situations I choose a specific custom or fabric to see how it moves around the body, but there is not a recipe for it. I see how an idea comes across on camera and I try to push it to see how far it can go. The type of images I create are not something you can imagine sitting on a desk, they are all about improvisation and developing them step by step. The target is always to get something that looks weird and surprises me, that gets me thinking “how did I do that?”
Do you find inspiration in external sources or does it all come down to your own body?
I do. Lately I am very inspired by dance. I come from the field of acrobatics but lately I see little movements on dancers I see on social media that touch me. I am also very inspired by the idea of overcoming gravity - of both succeeding and failing in defeating it. I am inspired by humour and silly things. It is great to see people not taking themselves too seriously.
What about music, does it affect your work?
Different types of music inspire me, it depends on the situation. Normally classical music, something very calm that allows me to stop thinking. I always work with that idea in mind, the idea of allowing the mind to quiet and get the body flowing. For certain images I look at either more upbeat music or something quite depressive, it depends on the moves I want to capture.
You never show any faces, is there a reason for this?
I think it started as a plexus of my process. When I was starting I thought it might be narcissistic to show myself in the images so I had the idea of hiding my face so the work could be all about the body as opposed to me as a person. If I look at any image and I see a face I start to think about the subject: Who is this person? What is his life like?
My work focuses on the expression of the body, something we all have regardless of gender. I have a female body, so I do play with the clichés that come with it, but sometimes I try to be neutral and play with the idea of genderless bodies.
Until Further Notice was the series you developed last year during the first COVID lockdown. The images portray a certain kind of humor and a little bit of insanity. What was the actual idea behind it?
This was definitely the idea behind it! This series had two aspects to it. On one hand, the fact that we had to isolate ourselves and our homes started acting as a shelter for protection, but on the other hand, as social beings that couldn’t interact and encounter other people we started to lose a little bit of our minds and bodies, we started craving the risk of being outside so we could interact with each other.
Personally, it was also about the paradox of being lonely because of the lack of interactions but also living in non-stop routines. I have a young family of two kids so my house was always full of noise and energy. So, the series for me was about finding little moments for myself, a place to hide out and be silly for myself
What are you working on at the moment?
I am furthering on the subject of house and family but working around it from a different angle. I want to focus now on the similarities of the bodies of children to their parents. I am just trying to think of how I could do this without exposing my children because I don’t want them to become an Instagram thing. My children are very athletic so maybe I can do something where bodies are merged and you can only identify certain body parts.
I’ve also started working with a drone that takes images every 8 seconds, so for the first time I am working around the idea that I am not the photographer. It gets me thinking about what it could mean in a deeper sense to show myself to a “machine” that is observing me and seeing me perform. I am also photographing the drone and myself together and have been toying around with the idea of making it a live performance. We will have to see how it works out.