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all images from the series Double Bind, 2010
courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London

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For his latest project, Double Bind (2010), American artist LEIGH LEDARE arranged a trip to a remote country house where he spent four days photographing his ex-wife, MEGHAN LEDARE, whom he had divorced five years before. Two months later, his ex-wife returned to the same location, this time with her current husband, ADAM FEDDERLY, a photographer. He also documented her for four days.

The result of this doubled process is about thousand images in total, both strangely intimate and strangely similar, sharing a certain erotic ambiguity and encompassing voyeurism: The question becomes how a person is bodied forth into the world by another’s gaze, LEDARE says, how one person gives another permission to be a certain way, to be a certain person for that moment. It’s dealing with this impossibility of the shift in the relationship and the inability to acknowledge certain feelings and potential desires that may still be very present.

Working with photography, archives, film and text, the focus of LEIGH LEDARE’s practice lies in an investigation of how we are formed as subjects, not merely at the level of identity but at the level of our projected desires, motivations and aspirations. His famous photographic essay Pretend You’re Actually Alive (previously published on WFW) already pushed photography to its limit by capturing his unusual relationship with his mother.

And good news: in 2012, a survey of his work is planned at WIELS in Brussels, stay tuned!