Uncanny Eye Candy by Brooke DiDonato

There’s a melancholic desperateness to Brooke DiDonato‘s work that echoes the soullessness of our day to day existence. The boredom. The repetitiveness. In the matter of a shutter click her work speaks volumes. A housewife with her head squashed between two vertical columns. Discombobulated arms reaching out from the thick, green bushes. A roller door slowly crushing the woman standing beneath. Or the almost humorous if it weren’t so bleak, a woman collapsed on top of a pillar, balancing a vase containing two roses on top of her broken back… Lord knows however exhausted we are, one has to at least give the suggestion that everything is hunky dory, that the house is immaculate and all is well with the world. Even when it’s clear to all and sundry that the lights are on but no-one is home.

Her work is not all doom and gloom though. There are reprieves from this sorrowful narrative, and it’s evident Brooke DiDonato has a lovely sense of humour. A lightness, a joy, and a way of juxtaposing beauty and mischief hard up against the concrete, intractableness of life.

The flowers that grow through the telephone line – how sweet life is when we receive love and kindness from a phone call. The floral bouquet that whimsically pops out of the toilet bowl – maybe life isn’t all shit? The flowers that blow out of a car’s exhaust pipe and spill onto the bed of roses below – maybe we can run this world on love instead of carbon? The black men’s work shoes laced with daisies – maybe there’s a little mischievous, nature-loving leprechaun in all of us? All of these images capture such lovely moments of wonder in an otherwise dull, predictable world.

Brooke Didonato is a Brooklyn-based photographer who decided to take a medium that usually captures reality and instead, she captures images set in a real location with characters that express an exaggerated or an imagined experience.

“Her work explores the complexity of human perception and what happens when psychological anomalies manifest in reality,” reads her artistic statement.

And then there are those pieces that show both hope and despair. The melting wax roses, both sensuous and sad at the same time. Her portraits of human existence, the violence, the lack of belonging, the moments of exhaustion, the wonder, the moments of peace. There are very few human emotions that aren’t unexplored in her work. Each photograph lends itself to a hundred different interpretations. And if it is true that life is only made up of our perception of it, then we are challenged by DiDonato to ask ourselves in what way do we see our own lives? And how is our perception of our lives dictating the very quality of its existence?