Contemporary Photography

In this photo by Sandy Skoglund, entitled “Cocktail Party,” the photographer has constructed a highly formalized photo of cocktail party attendees covered in cheese curls. Not only are the subjects covered in cheese curls, but the floor, walls, ceiling, and furniture are as well.
Of the ten figures in the photo, only four are real people. The figures with their faces covered in cheese curls mannequins. Skewing the lines between reality and falsity, there in no direct way for the viewer to know that these are mannequins (I know because I saw a video on Skoglund’s website that shows her staff with the fake figures.) Each live figure has brown hair, contrasting with the yellow/orange of the thousands of cheese curls. All of the subjects act independently of the lens, mingling with each other at the “party.” The two figures in the foreground of the photo maintain look lifeless and frozen in motion. Blue clothing is visible underneath the spaced out cheese curls that adorn the subjects. Using the cool-toned blue to juxtapose the warm-toned orange, the viewer is well-aware that the people are wearing clothes. The photographer is sure to draw attention to the reality of the photo by making the clothing and faces of the live subjects visible. Is Skoglund making a stab at the absurdity of cocktail parties, implying that they are “cheesy?”
Skoglund’s photographic style is comprised of using real-life photography with the addition of manipulated images. In “Revenge of the Goldfish,” she photo-shopped the images of goldfish over a photographed bedroom that contained two human subjects. The entire room, furniture included, had been painted a deep, ocean blue. The humans were now part of the fish’s contained water-world.
Making her viewer interpret and contemplate the meaning of her photos, Skoglund exemplifies contemporary style. Taking a jab at pop culture, Skoglund weaves a complex composition that demands decoding on the part of the viewer. The idea of her photo takes precedence over the depiction of your average day cocktail party. Hirsch states, "Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the first generation of image-makers to have grown up with computers initiates its course and seeks to discover its own syntax, photography is making a conceptual shift from a medium that records reality to one that transforms it" (424). Skoglund is doing just that with her photography. She makes her viewers contemplate meaning- meaning of her photos and meaning of their reality.

Here is the link to Skoglund's website where I viewed the video of the creation of her photo, "Cocktail Party."