Guapa (Goodlooking) Series

Guapa (Goodlooking) Series encapsulates Tracey Moffatt’s unique cinematic imagination and compelling stance on power and gender relationships. Executed in 1995 when the Australian artist was in residence at ArtPace in Texas, this series of ten photographs captures the frenetic and intense energy of a roller derby match, the ferocious female players crashing into each other and battling it out for victory. Together, the individual images present a dynamic narrative, appearing as though film stills from an action-packed movie on pause. In this regard, this series bears witness to Moffatt’s inception as a filmmaker and music video producer in the 1980s: her photo-essays retain a staged appearance that reveals Moffatt’s role as a director, recruiting and supervising actors taken from the streets, directing them in visual scripts functioning as statements about sexual, gender and social issues. Challenging the unrealistic ideals of beauty promoted in the media, the women in Guapa (Goodlooking) Series are powerful and aggressive, forceful and energetic. Capturing these strong female characters in black and white recalls the old American roller derby broadcasts. Moffatt envelops her subjects in a romantic atmosphere by printing her black and white negatives on colour photographic paper: delicate, washed hues of magenta create a dreamlike atmosphere, reminiscent of the ambient environment portrayed in Alfred Stieglitz’s and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, photographers Moffatt has found profoundly inspiring: ‘I’m always looking to the past for inspiration, pouring over old photography books and thinking of turn-of-the-century photography—Alfred Stieglitz and another wonderful photographer, Annie Brigman, who was part of the Californian Pictorialist group. Those pictures were printed with the platinum process, a very beautiful, romanticized photography before hard-edged modernist photography was invented’ (T. Moffatt, quoted in C. Fusco (ed.), ‘Tracey Moffatt’, in BOMB Magazine, no. 64, Summer 1998, www.bombmagazine.org/article/2149/tracey-moffatt).