The distortion of reality in photography is a seriously hot topic right now. Barely a day goes by where debate around the amount of poetic licence taken with the Photoshopping of magazine images isn’t batted around Twitter like a rubber ball at the beach. The chatter became especially loud when a YouTube video of a digitally morphing girl went viral at the end of last year, and more recently, when feminist website Jezebel launched a campaign to track down un-retouched images from Girls star Lena Dunham’s American Vogue cover shoot with the offer of a $10,000 reward. (For the record, said images had barely been altered and Vogue brushed aside the criticism with their alibi-worthy Instagram from the shoot and a hilarious video where the magazine’s international editor at large, Hamish Bowles, teaches Dunham to pose like a model, dance-move style). 

Creating images that bend the boundaries of reality is something that artist Charlotte Cory has been doing since long before GQ artificially lengthened Kate Winslet’s thighs. ‘I think we all accept that pixels are very mobile now and we can just do what we like with them’, she told us, sitting alongside her signature photographic portraits of animals as Victorians that fill her studio. ‘The technology is there, so why wouldn’t we?’, she continues. When also working as a magazine writer, before such pixel-bending practice was common place, Cory describes ‘merging images’ to better illustrate features, for her own ‘private fun’, keeping the changes secret from her editors even though ‘that was a complete no-no back then. I was breaking all the rules of journalism’. Now, she notes, ‘that’s changed, they Photoshop everyone’. 

Deliberating on the idea that ‘technology always catches up with human imagination – people thought about magic carpets and eventually they invented aeroplanes’, Cory asks, ‘why not be able to re-construct, alter and change images when you can do it in your imagination?’. Many would be quick to weigh in with the response that the cultural impact of bombarding people with images of lean bodies and illuminated skin that would be entirely unachievable without lengthening and lightening digital tools, could be incredibly damaging. In reference to one of Jezebel’s original photo re-touching revelations involving a now infamous Redbook cover, The Cut recently pointed out that ‘Not even Real Human Faith Hill looks like Faith Hill on the cover of a magazine’, and while it would be naïve to suggest shots should never be altered, it does make you think that there is perhaps a line to be drawn. 

There’s no such reason to worry about Charlotte Cory’s altered images however, given that she deals entirely in the fantastical appropriation of animals into old Victorian portraits. ‘Every image is supposed to be seamless’ she says. So even though you might be seeing an otter in a suit, she wants you to ‘look at them and totally believe in them’. If one gallery visitor’s enquiry of ‘how does Charlotte get the animals to stand still to put the clothes on?’ is anything to go by, then Cory’s work is a job well done.

Not that these seemingly harmless images haven’t faced their fair share of controversy, however. During her latest exhibition, Capturing the Brontes, shown at book-nerd hotspot, the Bronte Parsonage Museum and Harrogate’s Mercer Art Gallery, from 29th January - 12th February alongside afternoon tea at The Gilbert Scott and from 5th February at London's Long & Ryle Gallery, not all were as charmed by images of the famous literary sisters depicted as a menagerie of creates as the artist may have hoped. ‘People who are real Bronte-worshippers got quite angry’, she said. ‘I don’t think the parsonage has ever had a visitor’s book with quite so many comments! It was quite breath-taking’. The common complaint was that people had come to the museum to see original Bronte artefacts, not something new and abstract, the irony of which didn’t go unnoticed by Cory who speculated that the boundary-pushing Brontes perhaps ‘would have enjoyed the fact that it was something completely new’, rather than having their former possessions pored over like religious relics. Still, even if the author of Jane Eyre in a new canine guise isn’t your thing, comments including ‘Charlotte Cory should be shot’, and ‘whoever sanctioned this exhibition should be fired’ seem a little strong. 

Bringing the sense of the new to items rendered redundant by the passage of time and the people by whom they were once cherished, is at the heart of Charlotte Cory’s work. By resurrecting old snapshots that have been ‘discarded in junk shops’, or taxidermy, from which she photographs her animals, rescued from museums that would have otherwise ‘chucked it all out’, she ‘gives them a new life and a new existence’. As a devoted life-long vegetarian, Cory is especially interested in posthumously celebrating creatures who’ve been stuffed. The practice of taxidermy, she says, is something that she is actually quite uncomfortable with, ‘but at least what I do is recycle them’. Part of her reason for want to do this is ‘because I always feel a bit sorry for them. Much loved once and wanted no more – and dead! How awful’. 

Wherever you stand on the issue of image re-touching, then, there’s no denying the creativity and charm of Charlotte's imaginative animal portraits. Just don’t go getting on the wrong side of a Bronte buff.

 

 

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