Visual metaphors of human ironies: Peruvian photographer Ana De Orbegoso artistically accentuates her social commentary with unusual and inspirational images.

• Author: Snow, K. Mitchell

It's always entertaining to watch Peruvian photographer Ana De Orbegoso transform verbal concepts into visual comedy. Her humor arises from the realities of daily life, but her images of the human comedy never document day-to-day occurrences. She approaches her photographs like a theatrical designer approaches a script, carefully assembling the elements she needs to convey her message. Her created scenarios mirror the foibles of human society, lifting the edges of social convention to show the truth that often lies just below the surface of propriety.

"My primary fascination is with human beings--their internal worlds and the boundaries between them," De Orbegoso says. "Through my photographs, I always attempt to convey that almost imperceptible world of emotions, thoughts, and sensations. The images themselves are almost always staged and often manipulated--my version of a grammatically structured sentence."

Before changes in technology made it possible for the "perfect moment" philosophy behind modernist photography to emerge, photographers routinely acted as stage directors. Their studios were filled with props and their images with carefully placed performers.

Modernism actively discouraged such creative expressions, pushing this practice into the background for nearly a century. Photographs that had been built rather than encountered began to reappear during the post-modernist era and re-blossomed with the advent of digital photography.

Modernist photographers thought staged images weren't the kind of serious art the medium demanded, and there's no denying that De Orbegoso's images can make viewers laugh. Critics in both North and South America have noted the artist's propensity for childlike delight in creating her scenarios; they also recognize that her humor is fun of the most serious variety.

De Orbegoso began her artistic career studying art restoration and decoration, which is why she considers photography only a point of departure for her art. After establishing herself as a decorator, she began to pursue intensive work in cinema and photography in New York at the International Center of Photography, the Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. She also studied digital photography with a number of notable artists, including John Paul Caponigro.

De Orbegoso makes use of all of her varied studies and experiences in the arts to create her images. Her artwork, she explains, arises from the "need to express myself visually. The result is almost always a photograph, although I am always mixing other plastic media, which satisfies another need--that of including hand work in the creative process, whether in pre-production of the image or in the darkroom. I manipulate the image using processes that give me some physical contact, and this gives me more intimate contact with the work."

The hours she spent surrounded by facsimile beings during her employment at a mannequin manufacturing and rental company inspired her first notable series, Notes on a Parallel World [Apuntes sobre un mundo paralelo]. Surrounded by bodies that look like humans but lack the spark of animation and personality, she discovered a number of juxtapositions of the seemingly real which carried a very real emotional charge.

Using nothing more than old, tattered...