Melanie Pullen: Voyeur

The exhibition will range from Pullen’s highly acclaimed High Fashion Crime Scenes to her more recent Voyeur series, which the artist sees as a continuum of related themes.

Melanie Pullen explores our desensitization to violence and its glamorization, especially involving women, through dramatic recreations of actual crime scenes and images depicting our voyeuristic natures. Through meticulously re-constructed, theatrical compositions, Pullen depicts scenes which examine social constructs and their taboos. Engaging in a critical dialogue of ‘forensic aesthetics’, Pullen interrogates and seduces with images that challenge our presumptions and raise ethical quandaries.

As Pullen states, “I’m continuously creating imagery that questions our perceptions and our ingrained desire to observe the forbidden, to find beauty where we shouldn’t and to glamorize violence.”

Pullen’s disturbing yet captivating images, reveal the voyeuristic tendencies in us all. She self-proclaims their appropriation as exploitative as the images boldly confront societal mores through tongue-in-cheek tableaux.

In her critically acclaimed High Fashion Crime Scenes, Pullen re-imagined true unsolved crime scenes and suicides sourced from the Los Angeles and New York Coroner’s Offices and the Los Angeles Police Department’s archives. Giving herself a guideline, the subjects were never post-1950 and were always unidentified “Jane Does”. 

Her elaborately detailed sets often utilized luxury brands to re-dress the macabre scenes into high-fashion photo shoots, accentuating our tendency to sensationalize horrific acts. She addresses sexually directed violence and ushers a critique of how media often chooses to glamorize the depictions and in its wake desensitizes the audience. Through Pullen’s lens, agency is afforded to unknowns, exhumed from the annals of a coroner’s office and resurrected in these memento mori. Due to her work and research, she is on the Los Angeles School of Forensic’s advisory board.

The counterpart to High Fashion Crime Scenes is Pullen’s recent Voyeur series, which she sees is a natural extension of the themes in her previous work.

In Voyeur, the subject’s fetishized gaze is caught in the cross-hairs of Pullen’s predatory lens. The images are dramatic and seductive, richly colored and luxuriously composed. Yet, there is also a distinctly film noir sense of menace. Stalking the stalker, the audience begins to realize that they too are complicit. 

As with Crime Scenes series, Pullen cloaks her voyeurs in the couture of Prada and Marc Jacobs, further emphasizing our tendencies toward objectification, possession, materialism and commodification. Titling the series Voyeur,  Pullen also suggests that there is an erotic element at play, an excitement in surreptitiously peering into someone else’s private, intimate moments.

Pullen employs cinematic lighting and staging and is inspired by film directors such as Stanley Kubrick and the French New Wave, yet her signature aesthetic was initially borne of resourcefulness. Producing her own sets, lighting and styling in a guerrilla-like process at the beginning of her career, her work has matured to where she now can employ up to one hundred people for a shoot. Working with Hasselblad and Leica cameras, has allowed Pullen blow the images up to their monumental scale.

Melanie Pullen’s photography has been exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries internationally. Her work is in many of the most prominent public and private collections around the world: Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Jacksonville, Florida; The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Howard Stein & the Forward Thinking Collection, New York, New York; Walker Art Center Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Rand Collection, Santa Monica, California. Most recently the Getty Museum, Los. Angeles, CA acquired several pieces from her High Fashion Crime Scenes which now reside in their permanent collection after being included in their exhibition: Icons of Style: 100 Years of Fashion Photography.

Pullen’s work has been featured in a number of publications including: The New York Times, T Magazine; Los Angeles Times; Vogue; Esquire Magazine; ELLE; London’s Independent; Spin Magazine; W Magazine; Flaunt Magazine; 1814 Magazine; Rolling Stone Magazine and Vanity Fair. 

Melanie Pullen has published three photography books, two with Nazraeli Press, the other with Kodansha. Melanie was awarded the D&D Yellow Pencil Award in 2007.

Melanie Pullen currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.