Whitney Hubbs: Say So

Book excerpt: A provocative and timely new take on self-portraiture and erotica Featuring a black vinyl cover with gold foil stamping, Say So brings together American artist Whitney Hubbs' (born 1977) recent self-portraits, made in the style of cheap, pornographic pin-up photography. After her acclaimed book Woman in Motion, in which she photographed models, Say So continues her quest to explore and challenge the relationship between the camera and the female body. In it, she uses and abuses her own body to revealing effect in masochistic (BDSM) performances which sit at the intersection of eroticism and humiliation and are wonderfully uncomfortable to digest. Using the camera as both an audience and a mirror, Hubbs positions her work within a long tradition of artists using photographic self-portraiture--from Claude Cahun to Valie Export and Boris Mikhailov--and reworks its language with a stripped-down, rowdy formalism that pays homage to her Riot Grrrl past. Say So offers up an outside position (drenched in inky black humor) responding to precarity, loneliness and marginalization in a world badly off its tilt. Hubbs' photographic work is accompanied by a new essay by iconic writer and critic Chris Kraus, author of the seminal novel I Love Dick.