Jessicka Viscera is the warped mind behind Visceral Photography, and her imagery is visceral to the extreme. Her work explores the abyss of the human mind – the place some of us love to look into, while others pretend it’s not there. Some of these images are more subjective rather than objective; I feel like we have been invited into the mind of the subject, looking through their eyes at themselves, a mirror image of their consciousness. Her series of bound women is powerfully suggestive not of physical bindings, but mental ones, they way we keep ourselves contained in order to please the world. With her series “The human stain,” she closes in on bruised skin, cracked lips and a rolled back eye, the pieces of human flesh that show pain and suffering. Her dark photography illuminates faces of fear and violence, white death masks and crimson blood, fingers and teeth coated in ebbed life. “Thanatomorphose,” a series of death portraits, shows decomposing birds, flowers, bones and even man-made objects, vignetted on beautiful backgrounds of rebirth, the soil and vegetation feeding off the corpses. Unfortunately, I got to this post too late to let you in on her contest to win prints of her photos, but maybe if you’re lucky and you follow this talented photographer, you’ll catch the next one!
