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PHOTOSYNKYRIA 98
10th International Meeting Thessaloniki,
February-March 1998
BATHERS |
In the days of the Ottoman empire, regular visits to the hamam or
Turkish bath represented one of the few occasions on which women,
rich or poor, were permitted the indulgence of social interaction
outside the confines of their family. By the mid - 1990s, the ancient
bathhouse photographed by Lala Meredith-Vula in a remote town on the
Albanian-Montenegrin border may well be the last functioning specimen
of its kind in the Balkans; now, however, her Bathers are the poorest
of the poor – the homeless, gypsies, those with little or no
access to water and bathing facilities of their own.
The place itself is magical: a vast, steamy, echoing chamber, walls
a palimpsest of streaked and cracking plaster dripping with condensation,
fitfully illuminated by shafts of light falling from openings high
in the dome above. Within this space, Meredith-Vula’s flash
isolates and highlights the unselfconsciously naked bodies of women
young and old at their ablutions. Miraculously indifferent to the
photographer’s activities, since over the course of time she
has herself become part of the scene, the women wash their hair, scrub
their children, pour hot water over one another, shave their legs
or simply relax and gossip. Her record, depicting a very evident comradeship,
underlines the importance of the bath-house as a physical and even
psychological necessity, rather than exotic, slightly louche luxury;
as the artist notes, “for these women…the baths offer
not only a practical means of keeping clean, but also a temporary
refuge”.
Some of the women photographed are, by contemporary standards, strikingly
attractive; others are tough, corpulent matrons or elderly grandmothers.
Meredith-Vula succeeds in doing something very rare in photographic
depictions of the nude: without depersonalising or unsexing her subjects,
without reducing them to either slabs of meat or abstract stereotypes,
her camera treats them all with the same unconditional and courteous
delight. The results, in a genre which all too often lurches uncomfortably
from coyness to grotesquerie when it does not skirt (or embrace) the
pornographic, have a liveliness and innocent sensuality reminiscent
of Bonnard.
John Stathatos
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