All photographs taken by Alma Haser. Used with permission.
Strange and complex conceptual images define award-winning London-based photographer Alma Haserâs body of work, separating it from all others. From her ongoing The Invitation of Life series, in which she drapes her subjects with a thin see-through fabric, to the awesome album covers sheâs photographed, she combines her minimalist style with peculiar ways to represent the stories and concepts she wants to convey.
And in our humble opinion, none of her photographs are more distinctly representative of her craft than Cosmic Surgery, a bizarre and thoughtful series born of her love of origami and a need to create something unsettling.
“Alma has always made things with her hands and now tries to find ways to combine her fine art background with photography. She has used origami in the past as props in her photographs, but in this series âCosmic Surgeryâ the origami has become an integral part of the final image. With the simple act of folding an image Alma can transform each face and make a sort of flattened sculpture. By de-facing her models she has made their portraits into her own creations.”
Minimalistic and weird all the way through, Cosmic Surgery is a portrait series in which the subjectsâ faces are replaced with their origami versions that are created using multiple prints of their own faces. In effect, the subjects transform into something disturbingly inhuman or into characters in an insanely hallucinogenic horror story.
And yet, inexplicably, while the integral elements in these photographs are disconcerting, the process of making them is meditative and their overall impact to spectators is somehow calming and familiar.
See the rest of the photographs from Almaâs series after the jump.
To experience more of Alma Haserâs incredible work, visit her website.
