Ordinarily when you look at a photo your mind fills in an approximation of what is not seen from the photographer's viewpoint. In Chloe Rosser's images, heads and limbs are missing at such impossible angles that the mind is tricked into the feeling that there is nothing else beyond what is visible. Each body's connection with humanity is severed. They become abject lumps of flesh, like plucked and decapitated chickens, evoking both revulsion and fascination.
Rosser never digitally manipulates her images, unlike Belinde de Bruyckere and Asgar Carlsen, both influences; they use sculpture and Photoshop to achieve their uncanny effects of the body. Nor does she use contortionists to achieve her effect. when she started she was photographing herself using a timer, before moving on to her friends.
In later work, Chloe began to use older life models, with visible hair, cellulite and spots on their bums. "I really wanted to work with people whose bodies are more lived in."
Rosser says her work offers a way to step outside of our society's troubled relationship with the body. "I'm trying to change the norm here. Instead of looking at bodies and evaluating them, I'm allowing people to look at a body in an impersonal, fleshy way. You look at all the colour and the texture and the curves, as opposed to looking at them and judging them in the way that you normally would."
In her early photographs, taken on a floor of wooden planks, the forms are lit starkly from one direction, outlining in shadow every crevice and outcrop of flesh. Spines and hip bones jut through stretched skin. For all their grotesqueness, they are also exquisite with the fragility of life.
Chloe Rosser's first solo exhibition, Forms, runs 20th January - 14th February at The Vaults in Waterloo, London.