Flex Mentallo

The desire to dissolve the self into the world;

to become a ruin.

to be reconciled with the depredations of time;

The desire to accede to the ruins of time;

Impervious to age and the distress of flesh.

The desire to be emblematic.

To be done with personhood.

not a person

The desire to escape from a merely human appearance, to be an animal, not a person, an object [stone? wood? metal? cloth?]

The desire to impersonate someone else, but that is not other enough.

Other.

The desire to hide, to be camouflaged. to be elsewhere.

The desire to become fully visible, to be seen [at last] as one is, to be honest, to be unmasked.

What truly fascinates me though, is the striking parallels with my previous posts - I will leave you, gentle reader, to figure them out for yourself.

Since Sontag's introduction to the book is far more insightful than anything I could say about them, I will quote her words.

You may recall that Susan Sontag had written about Leni Riefenstahl's photos of the Nuba and pretty much destroyed them. The comparison with Vera Lehndorff is inescapable.

It was only years later that I realized the book had been published. I eventually managed to find a second hand copy - quite hard to come across in the days before the internet brought everything in reach.

I first came across these images in another issue of the Sunday times magazine. I'm sure I still have it somewhere.

Her first photo book, Veruschka: Trans-Figurations in collaboration with artist Holger Trülzsch was published in 1986, and is the one I wanted to share with you today.

They were an “exploration of visibility and disappearance, a near-perfect but uncomfortable analogy for her own life,” according to Frieze magazine.

Working with Holger Trülzsch, a painter and sculptor, she collaborated on photographic self-portraits in which her camouflage body paint blended into the background.

She reverted to her given name and rediscovered her first passion: art.

Veruschka retired from modeling in 1975.

Grace Mirabella, the new editor of Vogue, brought her in to do a Paris collections portfolio in 1972. The makeup, however, took five hours to apply—leaving the model exhausted by the time they were ready to shoot. “It absolutely showed in the pictures: They were dead; I had no expression,” she says. “Grace Mirabella wanted me to be bourgeois, and I didn’t want to be that. I said no. I realized it was no longer my moment. After that, I decided not to work in fashion again.”

In 1969 she painted her head to look like a stone and had herself photographed amid a group of real stones.