The word manifest describes what a thing ( a boat, a person, a vessel) may hold – its contents. Taking her cue from this definition, in her latest body of work Lisa Tomasetti reflects on gender identity and the role contemporary photographic portraiture plays in the representation of the ‘female’ image. Does it capture or construct identity?
Through the constancy and indifference of clouds, Tomasetti responds to historic, costumed representations of ‘authentic’ gender. In the past, the ephemeral nature of clouds defied scientific classification. Artists saw them as anti-structure, anti-order and representative of the complexity of human mood or aspiration. Clouds were the transportation of gods and angels, signifying the intermediate world between the hidden and the visible.
The historical costumes of Tomasetti’s models define them as hetero-normative, yet closer inspection reveals the costs of conformity and convention. The clothing and gender conventions they symbolise are restricting and restrictive. Through the lens of conceptual photographic vision, the models are depicted in the process of liberation from these constraints – ascendant, carried aloft by the clouds. Tomasetti’s subjects are unravelling, in an ungrounded escape from the restrictions of their gender-based impositions of ‘authentic’ gender. In some images the model’s anguished face and painted hands mock the grace of her garments . Her feet have all but disappeared – robbed of locomotion. In other portraits, subjects are further buoyed aloft by balloons, which seem to drag them skyward. There is a sense that without these precarious vehicles of flight, they might fall to earth, or disappear altogether.
A new representation and possibility for an entirely individual identity is asserted in this series, one that seems to be as natural and free-formed as the clouds themselves. Each model celebrates the construction of their re-versioned female self in its emergent form, defying the constriction of their physical representations and challenging the historic classifications of their gender identity. Utopia and dystopia symbolically collide in transformative ecstacy. Manifest is a manifesto for new ways of capturing gender in photographic form.
Lisa Tomasetti is a Sydney based photographer. She has exhibited extensively throughout Australia as well as holding solo shows in London, Barcelona and Shanghai. Her work is held in national public and private collections including The National Portrait Gallery and The National Gallery of Australia. From 2019-2020 her work was included in the National Portrait Gallery’s touring exhibition Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits.
Among her achievements as a visual artist, in 2023 Tomasetti was a finalist in the Olive Cotton Award, the recipient of three gold awards at the London Photography Awards and named the gold winner of The Muse Photography Awards. Previously she has been awarded four gold awards at the London Photography Awards, gold winner of the European Photo Prize, Muse International Awards, recipient of eight silver awards at the New York Photography Awards, and first place and gold star Neutral Density Photo Award. Tomasetti has also been been regular finalist in other major photographic prizes in Australia and abroad, including the Archibald Photographic Prize, the National Photographic Portrait Prize, the Bowness Photography Prize, the Olive Cotton Prize, the Julia Cameron Photographic Award, the International Photographic Awards, the Paris Photo Prize (PX3), and the International Fine Art Photographic Awards. Her work has been published in Look, Contemporary Australian Photography since 1980, and Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits. In 2020 Tomasetti published “The Australian Ballet on the International Stage”; a publication featuring her dance photography.
