Explore: Subtitles Screenprint Series
Words by Gabriel Rees
Subtitles
Miles Aldridge
2019
Sensual, alluring and urbane yet somehow faintly unsettling, imbued with an intangible sense of suspense, Subtitles (2019) offers an intriguing extension of Aldridge’s photographic practice of distilling intricate cinematic narrative and complex emotions into a single still frame. If, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, "Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie", then Aldridge’s beguiling series of glossy screen prints seems to fittingly tell a singular and somewhat contrary truth, that everything you see is a lie.
Every element of the composition is carefully contrived rejection of reality, instead allowing the audience to indulge in pure pictorial artifice in a manner reminiscent of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the overt sexuality of the scene stifled beneath a Hays Code of homage and subtext. The imagery speaks to a sense of romantic ennui, statuesque starlets gaze dispassionately into the middle distance from behind glazed over yet immaculately made-up eyes, as if to warn against the very model of perfection they’re seem to be selling. These frozen objects of beauty appear passive participants in their own story, artfully posed in acts of watching and waiting in a testament to the absurdity of Western ideals of romance, femininity and beauty.
"Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie"
The use of text in the prints only acts to complicate the scene. Intentionally vague platitudes broaden the sense of narrative but do little to explain it, calling to mind iconoclastic European cinema and lending a glamorous ambiguity to the drama reminiscent of Pop Art iconography. Indeed, the medium of screen printing itself holds a special place in the echelons of Pop Art history and Aldridge knowingly draws on this to give the works a broader cultural resonance. ‘Subtitles’ expertly bend the language of photography with art history, cinema and pop culture, using the tactile resonance of screen printing to create nuanced, almost textured works of artistic subversion which playing with ideas of high and low brow inference; offering us fragmented pop culture mysteries that subtly undermine the very meanings they embody and force us to question our own passive participation in the facility.
The making of 'Subtitles' with Miles Aldridge
Article information
- Credits
- Photographer
- Retouching
- Silkscreen Printer