Brianna Capozzi, Womanizer
Gallery / 7 images
Brianna Capozzi has sent me a list of what fascinates her as an artist. It reads, “New Yorkers, the East coast, the West coast, animations, blondes, things that shine, the colour pink, strong muscles, good hair, visible veins, skin showing, noses, teeth.” She elaborates, “Women and everything that makes up being one: the energy, the demeanour, the style, the way their bodies move, their muscles, their faces, their noses, their hair and their secrets.”
Her new book, Womanizer (published by Rizzoli), is permeated with these obsessions. Bringing together over ten years of glorious portraits and fashion editorials by the inimitable photographer, every page is a testament to the allure of women and the culture and artefacts of womanhood. “This book means so much to me. It’s a compilation of over a decade of my favourite images. The throughline between each image and woman is the charged, humorous energy that makes up a large part of my practice as a photographer,” she explains. “Women are so complex and powerful. We have the ability to do so much and be so grand. In my eyes, women really rule the world in all aspects of life and creativity.”
Capozzi brings an innovative, improvisational spirit to many of her shoots. While they are intricately moodboarded and conceived in advance with her longtime collaborator Haley Wollens, she’s agile – prepared to whip off her own bra to use as an accessory, or nip to goodwill shops and delis for props, taping and sewing bespoke accessories, street casting, breaking into abandoned properties to find the right location, or enlisting her boyfriend, family and neighbours as extras wherever required.
From her memorable Dazed cover of Selena Gomez in oversized Mickey Mouse gloves to her famous portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow looking sultry with a huge spanner, Capozzi has an eye for the absurd, yet her pictures always throb with sex appeal. In the book’s foreword, Chloë Sevigny – who appears multiple times throughout Womanizer – recalls her first shoot with the New Jersey-born photographer. It took place in an abandoned house across the road from Capozzi’s parents’ place – an interior decor time capsule of floor-to-ceiling mirrors and carved lion heads.
According to Sevigny, the ambitious plan involved various wigs and a lobster, which Capozzi used as makeshift underwear. The image of Sevigny reclining over the kitchen counter and wearing little more than a strategically-positioned lobster (later eaten by the photographer‘s parents for dinner), perfectly encapsulates the surreal sensuality of Capozzi’s work. “I love being sexy and I love making sexy work,” she explains. “I have always been obsessed with the glamours of life as a woman and the female body, and with hair and make up – starting with my own – and how it can portray different parts of me. My eroticism stems from these obsessions.”
Props are a huge part of what makes her images so distinctive. “I love the combo of reality and fantasy, focusing on making images that are not overly produced. They lean into the bizarre but always hold on to an authenticity and rawness that I think grounds them,” she tells me. “Props allow me to toe that line. The prop can be part of a larger storyline, or it can be random if I am drawn to the object without any deep meaning. The meaning always reveals itself once we incorporate it into the image.”
There is no one single muse or rigid template. Alongside Sevigny and Paltrow, Womanizer features an array of high-profile faces, including Kim Kardashian, Emily Ratajkowski, Miley Cyrus, Bella Hadid and Pamela Anderson, as well as Capozzi’s family and friends from her New York milieu. But they each bear the hallmarks of her amorphous muse, who Capozzi describes as possessing “a fearlessness to be different and a belief in themselves and their choices. [It’s] someone who doesn’t take themselves too seriously and who is thinking about what they want, not what other people’s opinions are.”
Unlike some of the photographers who grandly and erroneously claim the guiding principle of their work is to “dismantle the male gaze”, Capozzi’s work is truly brilliant in that it just doesn’t seem to give a shit about the male gaze. At times, she may appropriate traditional glamour photography, but there will always be some Capozzi-esque element that undermines those conventions and brings it back to glorifying the women she‘s photographing. Capozzi’s women are never passive, and they couldn’t care less whose gaze may or may not dare to meet theirs. “I always aim to hone in on someone’s unique qualities. I see their strengths and allow them a space to be fully confident and stand in their power,” she reflects. “I always want to uplift women and portray them as the forces they truly are with my own bizarre twist.”
Womanizer by Brianna Capozzi is published by Rizolli and is available here now.
