Vee SpeersA Presentation by Hatty Horscroft

Vee Speers, an Australian artist, has lived and worked in Paris since 1990. Speers studied fine art and photography at the QCA in Brisbane before working as a Stills Photographer at the ABC Television in Sydney in the 80′s. After moving to Paris she began exhibiting her series ‘Bordello’ , followed by The Birthday Party, Immortal and Thirteen, engaging viewers with the dramatic tension of her portraits and her unique pallet of colour.Speers has exhibited in London, Paris, Miami, NYC, Atlanta, China, Ireland, Singapore, Japan, Italy, Tunisia, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Sweden, Norway and the United States, and her work has been published on the covers of Fotomagazin Germany, Zoom, Public Art, Photo International, Images Magazine, A Conceptual Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, The Sunday Times UK, Russian Photo and Video, Swedish Photo with features in Zoom, Art Investor, Germany, Shots UK, Photo District News NYC, Photographica Tokyo, EYEMAZING, American Black + White, Milk, Fotomagazin, Chinese Photography, Bloom, Arte Al Limite, etc.Speers’ book ‘Bordello’ with a foreword by Karl Lagerfeld is available world-wide, and her second book ‘The Birthday Party’ was released in October 2008 by Dewi Lewis, UK.

About Vee Speers

What Vee Speers Looks Like

On Vee Speers’ website, this is on her front page: “ I don’t like to follow the crowd.

I like to seduce, with images that are at once disturbing and beautiful,

but leaving a space for the viewer to enter my world.

My portraits combine elements which evoke conflicting

emotions that can surprise the viewer, telling a story that is somewhere

between fantasy and reality, the obvious and the unexpected. “

Vee Speers Quotes

Vee has produced five different series of photos throughout her career. These five are:

Vee Speers’ Work

Karl Lagerfeld’s ideas on Bordello:

The twighlight of Vee Speers’ great photos of beautiful women causes the viewer to merge with the surroundings of the image and enter a kind of dream-like vision of an often sordid reality. Shapes lose definition and imagination overweighs perception. Real life is left behind… the boundaries between subject and photographer become more and more indistinct.She shows beauty where beauty can be terribly absent.

#1 - Bordello

Ideas on Parisians:

One senses the photographer’s keen eye for detail and symbolism as her subjects perform dramatically for the viewer, or pose against a backdrop, Speers’ dramatic set-ups are reminiscent of the early touring circus shows where peering voyeuristically into another world touched on all the senses. Speers met and photographed all her subjects in Paris.‘Paris is one of those cities where people can express themselves as they like, and no-one bats an eye-lid. It’s easy to be inspired here.’

#2 - Parisians

Ideas on The Birthday Party by Laura Noble, Eyemazing:The immediacy of Vee Speers’ imagery is overwhelming. Faces look directly at the viewer creating a quietly dramatic tension urging a reaction from the viewer. Speers earlier work in a series entitled ‘Bordello’ constructed elaborate filmic interiors of fantasy. Her new series, ‘The Birthday Party’ still presents us with a façade of fantasy but with a pared down aesthetic that amplifies the visual intensity through its simplicity. These portraits of children confront us with reminders of our own childhood, whereby a homemade costume can transform you into a superhero, princess, cowboy or soldier, poised for adventures and hours of fun and excitement. The escapes that these worlds of play can provide disclose the underlying realities of the modern world, wrought with conflict and violence. Child psychologists use observation of play to decipher underlying traumas and issues that a child may be experiencing. Looking at these photographs, Speers strikes a chord within us to trigger our own concerns in relation to today’s paranoid society. The emotive responses to her work divulge more about the viewer than the viewed.

#3 - The Birthday Party

Ideas on Immortal by Jim Casper:Vee Speers’ photo-based art, Immortal, is at once alluring and disquieting with beautiful youths set against backdrops of Eden-like natural beauty, or scenes of post-apocalyptic destruction. These Immortals are real people, young and beautiful, but they seem isolated, exposed and vulnerable, trapped, distant, on guard, defiant, and confronted by echoes of subliminal fears and insecurities.With the smooth gloss sheen of fashion-model perfection Speers has created a new world that merges Mona Lisa charm and mystery, with the melancholy of Dorian Gray. The surface is loaded with reference both to classical art, and to the airbrushed Photoshop perfection of youthful beauty that has become the everyday obsession of western culture.These Immortals are all like tragic fallen angels, eyes opened with animal intelligence, looking out onto an uncertain future, not even aware of how perfectly beautiful they appear to be right now.

#4 - Immortal

Ideas on Thirteen by Vee Speers:During my daughter’s thirteenth year, I photographed her as her childhood was eclipsed by growing pains and a desire for independence. The transition was unexpectedly fast, almost like observing the opening of a flower on fast forward. After capturing the last days of childhood in The Birthday Party, I have visually linked Thirteen by photographing only my daughter as the muse, against the same grey wall. It is, however, clearly a different story – one that explores the transformation from child to young woman, and new found freedom.

#5 - Thirteen

Sources:http://www.veespeers.com/

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