As part of Platform’s mandate to showcase leading edge artists who challenge popular perceptions of contemporary photographic practices, we are pleased to present Personae by Montréal artist, Pierre Dalpé.

In this ongoing body of work, Pierre Dalpé digitally manipulates scenarios in which the image of one individual is doubled or tripled to create a set of siblings, twins or triplets within one image- a family portrait, so to speak, of pure fabrication. Currently, Dalpé is broadening the scope of this series by including sets of real twins. Within this same series he also applies elements of costuming and disguise so that one individual can appear for example, as an other person of the opposite sex within the same photograph. These scenarios are meant to compel the viewer to question specific elements such as: the gender of the subjects portrayed, the authenticity of the era represented, and the true identity of any given person in the image. The artist’s intention with Personae is to manipulate the viewers’ perception and make them believe that they are looking at an actual documentary image of historical significance. While there is no actual story being illustrated, Personae relies on the viewers’ cultural literacy to supply a possible narrative.

“… [Pierre Dalpé’s] Personae series is dense with resonances. Not only are the gender ambiguities in these photographs unsettling, but embedded as they are within a tissue of references to photo-historical images, they undermine at the deepest level, representations whose veracity have been unthinkingly taken for granted. His project comments not only on gender construction and identity, but on a century’s trust in photographic verisimilitude, which must now be called into question with the ubiquity of digital imaging.”

Penny Cousineau-Levine