Efren Isaza

Teresa in Black Origami 1 Archival pigment print mounted on aluminum

2011

Isaza, one of Colombia’s most influential fashion photographers, initially studied fashion design. He united his interest in fashion with one of his earliest passions: photography. Graceful female figures lounge in fashionable poses. Paper costumes that seem borrowed from Oskar Schlemmer’s triadic ballet make the ballerinas look like marionettes. Their dislocation recalls the puppets Hans Bellmer featured in his surreal photographic experiments. The allusions evoked in the imaginative creations of Colombian Fashion photographer Isaza are diverse: he cites and alienates an arsenal of styles before melding them into new compositions of one-of-a-kind artwork. It might be a certain scene, a poem, a petal of a flower, or the idea of a person that inspires new work. His passion for breaking the boundaries of traditional fashion photography is palpable in each of Isaza’s unique works. He is less concerned with fashion than the image, the play of contrasts and the magic and the emotions sometimes saturnine, sometimes buoyant, sometimes surreal, and yet always beguiling that the image transports.