Weekend Portfolio: Molly Matalon
Images by Molly Matalon
Text by Nich McElroy
Molly Matalon’s When A Man Loves A Woman operates within a genre of photographs that depict the complicated interplay of desire and vulnerability. Matalon alternately plays audience, director, and participant in staged photographs with male subjects, typically in interior (and historically gendered-female) spaces. These subjects are friends, lovers, and acquaintances, flowers in bloom or decay, ripened or softening fruit, and objects at the emotional interstice of enjoyment and disgust. The photographs often catalogue ephemeral encounters and consumable natural objects, easy emblems of love, fertility, and beauty arranged in domestic settings or apt sites for a first date. While they truck in the popular language of what love, desire, and intimacy look like, this belies a more complicated origin.
Drawing from the male-dominated history of “straight photography,” Matalon’s images have a seductive clarity that evokes how our perceptions are sharpened in the excitement of an erotic encounter, and how those encounters are packaged and marketed back to us. But the intimacy being proffered by the subject or conjured by Matalon is rarely explicitly sexual, but rather quiet, vulnerable, tenderly perverse, akin to the tentative probing of someone seeking intimacy rather than a confident recounting of conquests by someone who has found it. The photos are a reciprocal performance: the chance for Matalon to create a close atmosphere with a subject under the pretext of a photo, and a chance for that subject to express their hope to be desired by a future audience. It is a collection less about the friction of bodies, which are often formally isolated in Matalon’s compositions, than the vivid and vivifying frisson of encounter.
When A Man Loves A Woman was made into a book which can be viewed here.
To view more of Molly Matalon’s work, visit her website or instagram.
