Ivonne Thein (Germany)Thirty-Two Kilos (2006-2007)Photography
Ivonne Thein – born in 1979, completed vocational training as a photographer from 1996 to 1999. She has been studying Photography from 2003-2009 at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and finished with the work proforma. In August 2005, she took part in the Dongang Photofestival in Yeoungwol, South Korea, and traveled through. In 2007, she studied photography for one semester at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Her works have been shown at various photo festivals in Germany: Berlin, Ulm, Düsseldorf, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt as well as in international exhibitions in London, Winterthur (Switzerland), Washington DC, Helsinki, Santiago (Chile), and Szczecin (Poland) - Selection. 2008 she was one Winner of C/O Berlin competition Talents. She also was mentioned at the competition of the London Photography Association Passion of fashion in 2007 and the New York Photo Awards 2009 in the category Fine Art Photography. Ivonne Thein lives and works as Photographer and Artist in Berlin (Germany). Thirty-Two Kilos by Ivonne Thein The pose is a balancing act in Ivonne Thein’s photographic series Thirty-Two Kilos. Here, she deals with the pathological striving of girls and women in the US to be extremely thin. The background to this work is a phenomenon that had already emerged in the US in the 1990s with the Internet movement Pro-Ana, which elevates anorexia nervosa to the status of a new, positive lifestyle for young women. In Thein’s series, she simultaneously calls the role of photography into question: in the case of Pro-Ana, this medium is, on the one hand, a document providing compelling evidence, but on the other, it is a consciously manipulated image. Photography takes on a key role in this process, creating and constituting extreme body images and ideals of femininity – with a direct link to the developments on the Internet. The phenomenon of the Pro-Ana websites is a product of our present day and age, in which individuality is being replaced by a totalitarian typology of images. Ivonne Thein employs the tools, modes of presentation, and superficiality of the fashion world in her visual language and compositional style. Furthermore, she has manipulated her photographs on the computer, turning slender models into anorexic bodies. Faceless and positioned in disconcerting poses, they oscillate in a transitory state between femininity and morbidity. The female figure in the hermetic photographs of Ivonne Thein is constructed, artificial – a doll. It is as artificial as the image of ideal physicality that so fatefully ensnares most people with eating disorders. Only through the exaggeration does a complex confrontation with traditional images of the female body become possible. Beyond this, Thein confronts the viewer with the question of the status and role of photography in the digital age. Heide Häusler |
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