Tobias Slater-Hunt is a photographer from Brighton, United Kingdom. His work focuses on the human body and explores concepts like life and death and existence and alteration. His series The Ascension is a tribute to the old Masters and a research on the timeless question of what is real and what no in art history.
“As a photographer I am primarily concerned with the externalization of internal worlds. The current project is The Ascension. A huge sprawling endeavour that uses Dante’s Inferno as an allegory for my own personal experience of long term chronic illness. By using Dante’s Inferno, as one text, and the tableau photograph as a second text, I am seeking to create an allegorical arena in which my images can explore the notions of illustration, authorship and interpretation.
These fictions, these strange physiologies, are based on the paintings of Cranach and Grunewald, drawing a line though Da Vinci’s grotesques to the present day practice of photographic portraiture, to question what is real. By utilizing modern technologies these photographs now have the same expressive possibilities previously only afforded to paintings. By using these technologies in a subversion of the norm, i.e to disfigure, mutate and expose flaws rather than to edit them out, I seek to reference the old mechanisms of picture making; considerations of composition, use of light and finally just what the human figure should or could look like. Obviously manipulated, the hand of the Artist is exposed, a confession perhaps or a portrait?”
