Vee Speers. The Birthday Party

Posted by Photo Slaves in PhotographersOct 5th, 2009 | no responses

The Birthday Party is a collection of children’s portraits. Vee Speers has stripped away the stereotypes of childhood in a far cry from the usual idealisation of the ‘happiest days of our lives’. She reveals the cruelty, vulnerability and duplicity of children. She captures children happy to play with imperfection and embrace the grotesque; children with a sense of danger and disregard for the social expectations of a birthday party smile. The resulting visuals are unsettling, with a transparency that is neither black and white nor colour, and the humanity neither that of an adult nor of a child.

This is the most recent photo series created by Australian-born, Paris-based photographer Vee Speers. People who remember her Bordello series will recognize Speers’ continuing fascination with the trickery of appearance, and the power of masks, costumes and outward signals from inner worlds.

These new photos seem suspended in time, much as the Bordello series did. Speers achieves this through brilliant casting, simple backgrounds, costumes and hair-styles that cannot be easily placed in modern times, and subtle hand-tinted color effects added to the original black-and-white Polaroid prints. The life-size images hover, large and luscious, on the wall — and can stop you in your tracks.

For the past fifteen years Vee Speers has been based in Paris, working in fashion, photojournalism and fine art photography. Her work has been widely exhibited and has been seen in publications including The Sunday Times, Harpers + Queen, Arena, Esquire, and Black and White Magazine.

We feel that hearing from the artist herself in this video will give you another insight, better than we can put into words here.