Changing Faces of Witches  in Contemporary Photography

Daria IOAN

doi:10.24193/subbdrama.2020.1.15

Authors

Daria IOAN Faculty of Theater and Film, Researcher in the IWACTA Project, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. ioandaria@hotmail.com

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24193/subbdrama.2020.1.15

Keywords:

witchcraft, photography, aesthetics, icon, magic, history of images.

Abstract

In photography, the image of witchcraft has always been associated with the quality of being different, due to the necessity of representing the inexplicable or the strange. Very rarely in the history of images the owners of paranormal powers have been presented as being immerged in banality. However, nowadays, photographers treat as well this aspect, but the image of witches is, by excellence, associated with an extravagant physical aspect. The means to do this are very different: the body, the outfit, the expression, the scenography of the environment where the witch is being represented shall take the attributes of an extravagance which underlines her/his qualities as out of the common, which also imply the idea of isolation and the glamour of a varied display of explicit powers. The new witches that some photographers depict nowadays seem born out of a desire for an anticapitalistic life, out of the system, as in the Wicca movement, for instance. In this paper, a focus is put on the aesthetic ways of presenting the image of the witch in photography, depending on the specific period of time artists refer to in their works.

Author Biography

Daria IOAN, Faculty of Theater and Film, Researcher in the IWACTA Project, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. ioandaria@hotmail.com

Daria Ioan is a photographer and teaches photography at the Faculty of Theatre and Film, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She completed her Ph.D. in theatre at Babeş-Bolyai University, Faculty of Theater and Film. She is currently working on a second Ph.D. in Cinematography & Media at the same Faculty. She is the author of Teatrul lui Jon Fosse (Cluj: Casa Cărții de Știință, 2013), Manual de fotografie (Cluj: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2016). She also published two volumes of poetry with photographs she made herself, and some research papers: “Vanishing Acts in Film and Photography,” “Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog. A post-cinematic journey through affection,” “The hard task of the resurrected body in Leos Carax’s Holly Motors. A baroque organs’ space poetry in film,” “A woman’s 69 looks. Cindy Sheman’s Untitled Film Stills,” “The Photographic Treatment of Emotion in Front of a Stage. Bill Henson: The Opera Project.”

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