Marcio Mascarenhas

In Today's lecture at university I was lucky enough to meet both Marcio Mascarenhas and Rasmus Vasli who are both portrait/art photographers. Mario Mascarenhas was first introduced to us as he nervously set up his power-point of images on the screen for all to see. 
       Marcio Mascarenhas is a Brazilian artist and photographer – but we should define him better as a “lens based” artist. We can presume that his main medium is photography, but his amazing vision cannot be limited to that. Interested in fine art and in cultural studies, his practice is a deep reflection upon concepts such as gender, identity, race. With such universal topics is very easy to lose the thread and start to produce mediocre pictures ranging from the banal to the obvious and cheesy. In fact his pictures (or installations) are not obvious at all, instead they try to de-construct the obviousness to let the viewer experience a world completely disengaged from the values we are used to.

The first series of photographs Marcio shared with us were from a series of work called 'I as another' 

Marcio Described this sequence of images as being about identity as such and how 'one' can never be one. The tangled bodies demonstrate how one is never one, it is always a part of someone. I really connected with this series of work as his concept and pictures are similar to what I am creating for our Portraiture unit and university. I totally understand the concept in the fact that one can never be one, we are a part of someone. Marcio also explained how people that had viewed his work when it was exhibited all said how 'beautiful' these pictures are, however when he took them he never intended for them to just be 'beautiful pictures'. 

The second series of photographs Marcio showed us were from a series called 'The bodies I live in'                                             
                                         

                                         

                                         

                                         
This series of work was inspired by the human form as a fragment of culture where the performance of gender, nationality and race takes place, defining identities. I really enjoyed looking though this series of photographs and I felt a connection with the photographs and concepts, however I personally am not keen on digitally manipulated images. Overall I found Marcio Mascarenhas' work very beautiful and interesting to look at and I felt that I really connected well with the images that were placed before me.