Red hair cascading from a printer. Figures shrouded by fabric. A magnifying glass poised at a woman’s neck. These images, captured by Polish photographer Diana Sosnowska (b. 1995), are inspired by the contents of two very different books: the medical photography landmark The Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, by Paul Regnard and Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, and Magic; Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography, an illustrative Victorian book on magic by Albert A. Hopkins.
In response to these texts, Sosnowska started the ongoing project Little Perversions (The Frantic Journey of the Wandering Womb). It’s a series of staged, at times theatrical, images that aim to “unfold the intrinsic guilt” often attributed to female desire. The body of work investigates constructions of womanhood through the lens of two very distinct roles: the magician’s assistant and the hysterical patient.
“In the Salpêtrière clinic, female desire and feminine gestures, inappropriately confined to the realms of mental illness, are treated and regulated in a variety of manners: hydrotherapy, electric shock therapy, confinement and eventually presented to an audience. On the magic stage, the very same gestures are supervised by the magician and re-enacted by his assistant as part of an elaborate and exuberant trick.”
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All images courtesy Diana Sosnowska.
