Julian Stern on Judie Bamber’s cropped centrefolds, the transparency of watercolour, and fragmentation as fondling.
“When you’re in the act of making love to someone, in particular with a woman, your face is up close to their body and you can only see parts. You’re not seeing the whole.”
This logic of intimacy and partial sight has come to underwrite much of painter Judie Bamber’s work. Yet between 1979 and 1983, when she was an MFA student at CalArts, she was repeatedly told that close-up views of the vulva were not appropriate subject matter. Even her personal reading of feminist theory at the time discouraged her from representing only parts of the female body, or from depicting women in the nude. “In my earliest series,” Bamber tells me, referring to her oil paintings of things like Duotone balls, “I was using objects as stand-ins for the body.” Fragmentation and objectification were so fraught in figurative painting that metonymy was the only device available for the young artist to explore her desire for women’s bodies and the erotics of close looking.
It did not take long, however, for Bamber to abandon such theoretical inhibitions. Her most recent series, which reproduces fragments of Playboy centrefolds from the 1960s, is yet another pearl in a long chain of salaciously cropped imagery. Her current solo show, Details of Impossible Past Lovers at GAVLAK Gallery, comprises these seven watercolours, each of them bearing a bit of what are likely—courtesy of her father’s cache of girlie magazines—the first pornographic images Bamber ever saw. As she explains, “the centrefold is divided into three pieces, and I thought of it as an exquisite corpse. I’d isolate a third, or, if I didn’t like the whole third, I’d start cropping in.” For instance, the October 1969 centrefold shows model Jean Bell from mid-thigh up, a towel held casually over her crotch as she stands in front of a window, a hazy landscape visible behind sharp butterfly decals on the glass—but Bamber reproduces only the top third. When I look at her Jean Bell (Miss October 1969) (2025) the composition is so tight on Bell’s face that the crystalline butterflies behind her read as flatly superimposed, the spatial context necessary to make sense of them stripped away.
Bamber is quick to remind me, though, that fragmentation entails more than mere reduction or omission: “There’s also so much detail brought out by the translation of photograph to painting. It’s photorealist, but it’s kind of hyper-realist, too. I get into things that are almost impossible to see in the original images.” These include the reflections in Bell’s corneas, the colour of her irises, and the shadows of her lashes—all of which intensify the fact that she is staring directly at me. To compare this pointedness with the softness of the Playboy original is to see the difference between erotic and pornographic imagery as Roland Barthes distinguishes them. Indeed, the punctum of an erotic picture is a “subtle beyond—as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward ‘the rest’ of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together.”
Given the appropriative dimension of Bamber’s work, her pictures are not so much launching points for desire as they are diaphanes through which desire can be recuperated. “In the process of pulling out details,” she says, “I’m kind of touching the image and touching this person, this body, through my eye and through the application of paint. That’s why I like the transparency and delicacy of watercolour.” The spatial ambiguity of the butterflies in Jean Bell’s portrait also contributes to this effect of transparency: Bamber’s pictures are not just to be looked at, but looked through—a way of lifting an image and its subject from the cultural system which produced them. “I’m clearly aware of the historical problematics of Playboy, and I hope that bringing a lesbian gaze to these photos might restore the models’ personhood and agency.” Hence the models become impossible past lovers, and fragmentation counters the very conditions that once rendered such imagery untenable.
Detail, from the Latin talea (twig, cutting), is really the key word for Bamber. In everyday parlance, these etymologically-embedded significations slip by, but an act of close reading parses the de-tail, and this, I suggest to Bamber, is precisely how her pictures work. “My thinking,” she answers, “is that the early feminist refusal to fragment the body relates to the meaning of cutting which becomes dismemberment, a violence being done to the body visually but also the tendency to reduce the female body to the bits that are of pornographic interest. But cutting a twig or tail from a plant can be rooted, can become another plant, another whole.” In Bamber’s hands, fragmentation is a kind of radical fondling.
