Black Girl in Origami Dress with Rooster II

Black girl in origami dress with rooster II, by Efren Isaza
Measures: 44 H × 72 W x 1 D in
Mounted
Archival pigment print on canvas Intervened by the artist
Signed, titled, dated, and annotated by the artist on verso.

This of one of a kind intervened artwork produced in 2009 and 2010 marks Isaza's artistic shift from traditional fashion photography into fine art. It was at this time that Isaza began to explore beyond the camera lens through the process of applying physical interventions to his printed images - using paint, crayon, tape, graphite, and other unconventional materials. This process gave him an avenue to explore photography to a larger developed scale, giving space for his female subjects to be depicted with more of a sense of grandeur.

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Isaza, one of Colombia’s most influential fashion photographers, initially studied fashion design. He united his interest in fashion with one of his earliest passions: photography. Graceful female figures lounge in fashionable poses. Paper costumes that seem borrowed from Oskar Schlemmer’s triadic ballet make the ballerinas look like marionettes. Their dislocation recalls the puppets Hans Bellmer featured in his surreal photographic experiments. The allusions evoked in the imaginative creations of Colombian Fashion photographer Isaza are diverse: he cites and alienates an arsenal of styles before melding them into new compositions of one-of-a-kind artwork. It might be a certain scene, a poem, a petal of a flower, or the idea of a person that inspires new work. His passion for breaking the boundaries of traditional fashion photography is palpable in each of Isaza’s unique works. He is less concerned with fashion than the image, the play of contrasts and the magic and the emotions sometimes saturnine, sometimes buoyant, sometimes surreal, and yet always beguiling that the image transports.