Swide Magazine by Dolce&Gabbana

In the world of Madame Peripetie, the innovative fashion photographer, everything is possible: meters of eyelashes, faces made of hair and hair only, models with huge lips as a head, women who puke flowers... How does she create those bizarre dreamlike images?

Marcus, the editor of a fashion and arts blog called 'à la mode' is our new contributor. For his first piece on fashion photography, he interviewed Madame Peripetie. 

Hello Madame Peripetie, I cannot believe you are my first artist to be featured on Swide! Well, I know you have a master degree in Linguistics, what made you want to change the career path to become a photographer?
I always wanted to work visually - my BA was all about Norwegian theater and theory of drama - it just happened to develop this way. Photography changed my life completely as I started working with visual "surface" - not only 2D but also 3D - sculpture, costumes and interaction between body and space. I found it very challenging combining the syntactic and semiotic elements of the language with visual ones and include theatre components as light and stage into my work. Now I'm focusing more on the dramatic composition and its key concepts such as anagnorisis and catharsis mainly because I am moving more to the video and film direction.

Your dramatic composition is what attracted me to look at your works in the first place so please do not stop this approach! Well, how will you describe your photography style?
They look absolutely unique to me. Well it is just my world –looks normal to me:). My world consists of many surreal and bizarre elements that keep coming back. I was never interested in depicting reality as it is – the escapism and interdisciplinary hybrid-thinking have always been fascinating me. Saturated colours and dark spaces, fabulous costumes, uncanny characters, quirky stories and unexplainable ideas– these are the elements that keep hypnotizing me whenever I plan a new photographic project. A tiny bit of mysteriousness and abstruseness is very important - if I understand something completely, I'm not interested in it anymore. You should keep everything mysterious since your photos do make me think all the time!

In the future, which celebrities would you love to work with?
Well there are some people I admire a lot like Björk, Tilda Swinton, Grace Jones and of course David Bowie. I think they are all masters of transformation and it would be a pleasure to work with them.

Yeah, Björk is someone I can see you will work with in the future. So, what do you think of the S/S 2011 Dolce & Gabbana collection? Does this collection give you any inspiration at all?
The new collection has something very delicate and vulnerable but also strong at the same time. I would inspire myself from the short stories of Roald Dahl or Heinrich Hoffmann and their childlike imagination without boundaries. I hope you will have a chance to use some of the pieces to do a shoot.

Last but not least, if you could do an editorial shoot for either Dolce & Gabbana or D&G in the future, how would you want to do it?
There will be lots of unusual characters with strange proportions, strong women and quirky animals.

 

Credits: Madame Peripetie, Marcus Kan

With special thanks to 'à la mode' 

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