‘Unsettling and arousing’: The imaginative gymnastics of Luna Lopez’s portraits

All pictures © Luna Lopez

The Danish Ones to Watch photographer grew up in a world of exercise and dance, informing her tender pictures which evoke the early experiments of Sally Mann

As an solely youngster, Luna Lopez spent rather a lot of time on her personal. Raised by her single mom and grandparents in and round Copenhagen, she attributes her “massive creativeness” to these childhood. Rising up, Lopez was all the time very lively, enjoying the drums and practising gymnastics most days of the week. However that every one got here to a halt when she turned 14 and was recognized with arthritis. Unable to make use of her physique like she used to, she turned her artistic focus to pictures. In 2015, she attended Fatamorgana, the artwork pictures faculty in Copenhagen, then moved to Sweden to review fantastic artwork pictures at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg from 2018 to 2021. 

Lopez’s mom is a dancer. Contrasting her mom’s fluid motion together with her personal severely restricted movement led to the photographer’s fascination with the physique and its expression. “When my physique stopped functioning in my teenage years, I turned conscious of how fragile it’s and how simply it could actually get broken,” she explains. Lopez makes use of her lens to discover that fragility, and hint a large number of our bodies and varieties. She frames them as artworks; the contours of reclining limbs, the crevices of folded pores and skin. “To {photograph} the physique in a sculptural means has change into a method to actually examine it and perhaps even to normalise and alter the perimeters we don’t usually present.”

Lopez’s follow is rooted in traditional documentary – she names Sally Mann “as an individual whose work lives inside me. She was the primary photographer who actually moved me.” As her work advanced, Lopez most well-liked to practise in a extra managed and staged setting. Her course of is sluggish, intimate and playful. Working solely in analogue, she images buddies and individuals who transfer inside comparable social circles. Her favorite topics are folks she feels she will be able to join with personally, describing her pictures as “pushed by feelings”.

“To {photograph} the physique in a sculptural means has change into a method to actually examine it”

Moderately than working in sequence, Lopez considers every picture as a standalone piece earlier than folding it right into a sequence. She is impressed by “footage and movies of random issues, like consuming contests, pranks, the Olympics, blowing bubblegum, hula hoops – you title it,” she says. “It’d sound silly, however these absurd issues awaken my creativeness.”

Types and faces are sometimes present in tense dialogue with on a regular basis objects: hairbrushes, wheels, flowers and springs. In a single unnerving portrait, a lady presses two steel forks towards her closed eyelids. “It symbolises wanting inside your self, to look at or observe your innermost feelings and behaviours,” she explains. “I don’t assume it’s all the time a straightforward activity to do, and not pain-free both. Generally it looks like ideas and emotions can eat you up – therefore the forks.”

These underlying metaphors create depth. Even within the extra delicate portraits, Lopez performs with ambiguity. “I consider that my footage might be perceived as each unsettling and arousing, a pleasing discomfort,” she says. “One thing that I discover very fascinating and that retains recurring in my footage is the dynamic between intimacy and violence. They’re full opposites, however someway they typically go hand in hand.” She provides: “I want it when folks need to look twice at my footage. I’d reasonably that folks go away with extra questions than solutions.”

Photographer Emma Sarpaniemi, who nominated Lopez for Ones to Watch, first encountered her work when Lopez was finding out at HDK-Valand. “I used to be fascinated by her uncooked and stunning visible language, the way in which she portrayed folks and on a regular basis life,” says Sarpaniemi. “It’s laborious to seize the essence of her work in phrases. I needed others to expertise the wonder of it.“ Lopez is making ready for a gaggle exhibition at Göteborgs Konsthall in June, and a solo present in Copenhagen at Rectangular gallery. She additionally hopes to publish a photobook quickly.