Stockings

Stockings

Artist: Ellen von Unwerth

This black-and-white photograph is composed around a figure seen from behind in embroidered stockings, a garter belt and lace, one gloved hand at her side, stepping between a grand carved fireplace and a marble mantel in an opulent, wallpapered interior. Von Unwerth fills the frame with Rococo excess, ornate plasterwork, a gilt urn, a zebra-skin rug before a lit fire, staging the scene as high boudoir theatre. The lettering worked into the stockings turns the garment itself into part of the picture’s script.

Read as fine art, the work is a study in seduction and stagecraft, the lavish period setting and the text-inscribed hosiery collapsing the boundary between the room and a private performance. The theme is provocation as language, the embroidered words making explicit the come-hither the whole scene implies, delivered with von Unwerth’s characteristic knowing wit rather than earnestness. Her signature is exactly this staging of desire as decadent theatre, glamour pushed to a deliberately excessive, cinematic pitch. The work belongs to her long engagement with sensuality and the private worlds of women, and speaks to collectors drawn to fashion photography’s crossover into fine art. Ellen von Unwerth’s photographs are typically issued as limited editions, each print part of a controlled run.

Size: medium

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