That is the pathos of photography, it is a medium of corrupted promise.

Introduction

Antony Crossfield is an artist who works across several mediums – painting, drawing, animation, computer graphics, and photography. In his photographic projects he draws on these wider perspectives to envision complex philosophical ideas within a magic realist aesthetic. This interview focuses on his imagery of the human body. Traditionally, art has treated the body as an object – idealised, symbolised, or deconstructed. In Crossfield’s work, however, the body is not merely a subject for representation; it is the very medium through which we experience the world. Drawing on the ideas of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Crossfield has developed a visual language of the body through which he engages with and challenges notions of (im)perfection, masculinity, patriarchy, and sovereignty of the self.

Merleau-Ponty rejected Cartesian dualism – the idea that mind and body are distinct and separate, or that we exist as isolated, autonomous individuals. He argued that our engagement with the world is rooted in our bodily experience, with many actions and perceptions unfolding unconsciously. For him ‘flesh’ is the shared medium through which bodies relate – a porous, dynamic field that defies strict separation. Rather than standing apart as detached observers of an objective world, our bodies are immersed in subjective experience, much of which remains unconscious. In this view, our bodies are in constant dialogue – a phenomenon Merleau-Ponty calls ‘intercorporeality’. It is this embodied, pre-conscious reciprocity that he understands as the basis of empathy. For him, empathy is not a detached intellectual exercise – an evaluation or moral decision – but an intersubjective resonance that allows us to both recognise and deeply experience another’s emotions, in turn shaping our own sense of self.

In his imagery, Crossfield portrays bodies as unstable, mutable, permeable. These bodies inhabit a paradoxical realm – both visceral and vulnerable – where he unravels and reinterprets social, aesthetic, and gender conventions. His work engages not only the intellect but also our shared intercorporeality, reminding us that the reality we experience isn’t born from a pursuit of idealised order, but from the mutual accommodation of our imperfect, interconnected, and transient selves as we navigate life. In this light, notions of rigid convention simply dissolve.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

You began your creative life as a painter. What prompted the move to photography?

As an artist I want to give priority to ideas rather than medium. Some ideas work much better when realised as photographs. Others are more suited to painting or animation. I try to choose a medium that resonates most interestingly with a given concept. For a great many of my projects that medium has been photography.

Photographs can be seductively misleading and, in the popular imagination at least, have stubbornly retained an aura of authenticity, of a single moment captured… even in the age of Instagram filters. This discrepancy between what a photograph is – malleable, unreliable, fragmentary – and how a photograph is perceived – as a reliable representation of the world at a single moment in time – resonates for me with the often-contradictory notions of selfhood and the body.

‘Foreign Body’ is a series you have been working on for more than twenty years. How did it begin?

One of my central interests from early on has been how to make portraits without resorting to the illusion of a unitary, contained, consistent self. How to make a portrait without suggesting that the self is somehow static or even knowable. If, as I believe, the self is fluid and mutable, then traditional forms of portraiture have largely tended to reinforce the complete opposite. People are constantly changing – I am not the same person I was two seconds ago. Neither are they singular and discrete. Our sense of self is a product of interconnectedness with other selves, as is the way we perceive our corporeal dimension.

So, the question for me was: how could I create an image of a person that suggests that mutability and interconnectedness?

[Left] © Antony Crossfield ‘Screen’ 2009 from the series ‘Foreign Body’
[Right] © Antony Crossfield ‘Foreign Body 3’ 2005

How did you resolve that question?

I wanted to create images suggestive of the idea that we are fundamentally embodied. The idea, best encapsulated by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, that we live in a world of flesh – that our vantage on the world is always from a perspective of a fleshy, corporeal experience. However, I wanted to convey how this apparently bounded existence is also dependent upon others. That our sense of self and our corporeality are fundamentally social experiences because we define and understand ourselves in relation to others. Our bodies are leaky, porous things that only make sense through connection with other bodies. Where I end and where you begin is less certain than it might appear.

How did you select the people in the images?

It was a very conscious decision to focus on men – in particular, white, middle-aged men. The history of the nude in Western art is largely one of male artists objectifying women. It has been a tradition of sexism, oppression, and control over female bodies. So, part of the concept was to invert that power structure.

More broadly, notions of masculinity are deeply linked to ideas of the sovereignty of the self, the ownership and control of the masculine body. I wanted to challenge these ideas. Presenting the body and the self as interconnected with, and dependent upon, others – as penetrable, with uncertain boundaries – takes on particular resonance when the subject is male.

‘Missing Mass’ explores a similar visual conceit but has a different vibe to it.

This work is about absence and lack. The title refers to what astronomers call ‘dark matter’ – the mysterious, invisible matter that scientists calculate must exist, but which cannot be observed or adequately explained. These images are visual metaphors for the body as lack, fragmented, incomplete. Unknowable.

Beds evoke associations of sleep and dreams, the unconscious, the very enigma of our self. But they also carry associations of the body departed, of death and decay. Themes evoked in these semi-submerged figures sinking into the mattress.

As well as being a photographer and painter you are a skilled retoucher, yet your images have none of that artificial perfectedness one usually associates with retouching. Why is this?

Making images directly with a pencil or a brush is very natural to me. Digital photography and digital postproduction tools made it possible to make photographs in a manner closer to the way a painting is made and that really opened up photography as a medium for me. Of course, in the commercial world, Photoshop is used relentlessly to create idealised images of the body. It’s such a limited and obvious use of what is a very powerful tool. It removes the most interesting aspects of a person, the imperfections, the character, the sheer oddness of the human body.

I prefer to retain those qualities and use postproduction tools more imaginatively. Unidealised bodies are fascinating and moving. I love physical diversity, strangeness, the unusual, which is in reality the ordinary. Painters like Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, even Rembrandt had an unflinching eye. They did not seek to idealise their subjects, and their gaze can seem harsh, yet it is also strangely tender and can be very moving.

This is particular noticeable in the way you render skins. Something one can see in detail in your ‘360 Portraits’.

Our visual culture disavows the reality of the lived body and, as I say, digital tools are usually used to obscure the skin’s imperfections. I try to use those same tools to achieve the opposite: to preserve, highlight, and revel in the variety, complexity and beauty of worn, damaged and lived-in skin. Any initial sense of distaste will, I hope, give way to a more profound sense of recognition, identification, and empathy.

Skin is a boundary. But it is also porous. I draw a parallel between the surface of the photograph and the surface of the body. They are both a kind of interface, an opening to discourse. Superficially, both appear to be singular, coherent, impenetrable. But this disguises a hidden fragmentary reality. This has been a crucial metaphor for me in all my work because it extends more generally to notions of selfhood and corporeal coherence. That’s why I like digitally manipulated photography: it is itself a metaphor for that illusion.

The images in ‘Inversion’ have a vertiginous sense of instability. What did you seek to communicate through this work?

I was interested in the notion of photography and truth. I took the perspective of a ‘God’s eye view’ – the idea of a sort of perfect, singular viewpoint from which objective truth can supposedly be perceived – as a metaphor for photography. I then literalised it with the aerial viewpoint of the camera. But I also undercut it with the disruptions in the image and obvious fictions. These were images that questioned photography’s status as truth, but they were also emotional images that spoke of anxiety, precarity, and vulnerability. The hanging figures cling to their worlds by their fingernails in an environment that denies their reality.

How did you go about making this image?

Needless to say, images like these are complex and time consuming to create. I do nearly everything myself – set building, designing costumes, and then the photography, retouching, CGI… However, I want the provenance of the imagery to remain a mystery. I want the viewer to experience the cognitive dissonance of believing what they are seeing while simultaneously knowing it cannot be real. My aim is to create uncertainty and destabilise accepted notions of truth. I would like the ideas and emotions to come across very clearly, but I want the way the images work on the viewer and the way they were created to remain mysterious.

Tell me about ‘Bomb’.

For me, questioning representations of masculinity and photography as a means of representation are central areas of interest. In this image I wanted to undermine stereotypes of masculine power. The man is bomb diving into the sea – a metaphor for destructive force. But he is tiny, naked, quite literally a drop in the ocean. Wider forces are about to overwhelm him, yet he is suspended in a state of permanent, unrealisable potential – an act of impotent posturing.

There is also something here about the fragility of photography itself. The delicately balanced illusion, its deliberate geometry, the almost perfect, glassy reflection across its flat surface – all permanently transfixed on the brink of collapse. For that is the pathos of photography, it is a medium of corrupted promise.

‘War Dance’ seems to carry a similar sense of illusion undermining expectation.

Again, this was a critique of the conventions of masculine representation. The concept was simple enough: to photograph two men having a tug of war and then digitally remove the rope. I selected men who looked stereotypically masculine – muscular, their lower bodies clad in business attire. The resulting images were interesting to me because the displays of strength and power were so effectively undercut when the rope was removed. With that simple edit those signifiers of a certain kind of masculine posturing come to look a little ridiculous. The men appear to be engaged in some kind of bizarre dance together. A competition for domination has become an image of interaction and connection, its macho pretentions undermined.

‘Forest’ is a fascinating image. What themes did you what to bring out in this work?

While much of my work focuses on the body, I also treat the rooms we inhabit in a similar way. The structures that contain us are revealed as equally imperfect, porous, malleable… providing little more than the illusion of containment. I wanted to depict both the bodies and buildings with indeterminate boundaries, with a sense of radical uncertainty as to where things begin and end. And, in this image, that uncertain line between inside and outside is given dramatic expression.

It’s a mysterious image and I am loath to provide much explanation which might thereby dissipate that mystery. Suffice to say that, for me, it evokes a world of pervading anxiety. A world of environmental collapse and global pandemics where there is the palpable atmosphere of imminent danger, right on our doorstep, even within our homes. Nature as an unstoppable force that cannot be reasoned with, and from which there is no escape. As nature and culture collapsing into one another, the structures we build to protect us give way to an encroaching threat that is ever present but remains somehow elusive.

The final series I would like to discuss is ‘Balancing Act’, which places the female figure front and centre.

One of the things about focusing on the male body in so much of my work was that it could seem like women were being edited out of the picture. So, I was looking for a way to bring female figures into the work while avoiding the conventional tropes of femininity.

My friend Cara is an aerial performer on ropes and silks. By photographing Cara, and another performer called Jodie, we were able to explore ideas of female physical strength under duress. The images involved holding and maintaining strenuous positions within an externally imposed structure – a metaphor for the position of women within a patriarchy. The figures are suspended in space caught in a sort of in-between zone – neither tied down nor flying free. Their bodies are beautiful but strained, every sinew taut.

The images have an eerie quality: the intestinal rope, the shroud-like floating fabric, the paradoxical space and constraint in this cavernous environment.

I designed the costumes – which were fabricated by Violeta Grajevska – to evoke bandages and gauze. In some images, the bodies seem to explode, losing all coherence. In contrast, the bandages and gauze impose and maintain form. I wanted to explore ways through which to visualise a sort of push-pull between the inchoate, untrammelled body and cultural constraints imposed to maintain a notion of order. The bandages and gauze spoke to a kind of medical pathologising of the female body seen as something to be fixed, controlled, and restrained according to patriarchal norms. And the whole thing is set inside an abandoned power station, suggestive of redundant, outdated patriarchal power.

[Left] © Antony Crossfield ‘Suspended Figure 2’ 2023 from the series ‘Balancing Act’
[Right] © Antony Crossfield ‘Suspended Figure 6’ 2023 from the series ‘Balancing Act’

As with much of the imagery I make, I wanted to evoke feelings of fascination and repulsion in equal measure. Many of my pictures are designed to be printed at a large scale so there is a visceral, corporeal relation to the imagery. I want to provoke thought by giving a physical jolt, a certain discomfort. I want my images to be confrontational and challenging but also to draw the viewer in. To fascinate and – in a strange way – to seduce.

In making these bodies of work, what have you learned about yourself that you did not previously understand.

That’s a difficult question. I tend to work in a solitary manner – constructing images alone in my room over many hours and days. My first creative outlet was drawing: working, head down, with just a pencil and paper. But photographing people is always a collaborative act and it has surprised me how much I have come to enjoy that aspect. The process of communication, the shaping of performance, the developing of mutual understanding, and the sheer surprise of creating collaboratively are always exciting. I find the simple generosity of another person presenting themselves to my camera curiously moving. It has surprised me how natural the whole process has become for me and how much I now revel in it.

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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