In the elliptical photographic world of Ada Marino’s New Moons, the female body is a strange and cryptic presence, captured doing strange and cryptic things. We see just bits of it; a tense hand that’s just missed catching a bird in flight, two legs cramming themselves into one shoe. It’s as if each of Marino’s young protagonists are engaged in a game with the camera—catch me if you can. And most of the time it can’t; these bodies resist and evade. They remain uncontained. We see just two faces; one close-up, eyes rolling backwards, held open by two pairs of hands, the other a determined head poking out of a cardboard box, like a DIY magic trick.
Like its namesake, New Moons is a project of renewal—the phase of the lunar cycle that symbolizes endings and new beginnings, urging us to let go of the past and look forward. It is born from Marino’s last series, Paterfamilias; a powerful confrontation with patriarchy and oppression, acted out in the confines of a domestic setting. Taking her grandmother’s relationship with her authoritarian husband as a starting point, the images brim with a feeling of being held captive in an “unsafe shelter,” the photographic frame echoing this claustrophobia. Further beneath the image surface a latent desire for escape and self-expression brews.
The photographer’s new work metabolizes this hardship, emerging with a fizzy, resilient energy. “New Moons symbolizes the phase of maturation and identity growth as fruit of an experience of domestic oppression,” Marino explains. “It is the construction on the rubbles caused by Paterfamilias. It is the sequel; a continuation and the rebirth of the protagonists’ story whose main imperative is a call for action.”
With the female experience at the heart of each of her projects, Marino has always drawn deeply on her own life to guide her practice and push back against the conservative, male-dominated environment she was raised in. The “awakening” she describes between the two projects speaks to the power of photography as a tool to process and reclaim our own narratives—and its importance as a medium of subversion in the struggle for gender equity.
Underpinned by feminist thinking, Marino’s surreal and symbolic visual language hits back at static representations of womanhood so often created and perpetuated by visual media. “Photography incorporates multiple functions: it is informative, inclusive and contains a multiplicity of perspectives which makes it a powerful medium of communication,” she says. “For me, it is an efficient vehicle of information through which I express dissent, intolerance and resistance.”
Each of her projects has a personal root that unfurls into wider collective issues. “Virgins on the Cross, for example, is an analysis of the ambivalence of motherhood,” Marino reflects. “But it also aims to dismantle the romanticized narrative of motherhood throughout visual language, recalling the stereotyped notions of mothers in the traditionalist society of which I suffered the burden in the past.”
In her exploration (and exorcism) of the repressive forces of patriarchy that she and the generations before and after her have had to endure, Marino invokes a variety of symbols that morph across her projects. From crosses to doll’s houses to domestic objects via clothing, the props the women and girls in her photographs interact with are charged with different meanings throughout the different chapters of the photographer’s life and work. At times, these objects seem overbearing and suffocating. At others, they are engaged in a state of play. In New Moons, they become almost enchanted, bewitched by the jagged movements of the girls occupying each frame.
Where a sense of entrapment characterized the photographs of Paterfamilias, the girls of New Moons seem possessed with a fiery energy, twisting and turning around their surroundings. Marino counts the writings of theorist Iris Marion Young as a key influence in her approach to this work.
In her essay Throwing Like a Girl, Marion Young explores the ways in which women are conditioned to navigate the space around them in a limited way, asking: “How do girls and women constitute their experienced world through their movement and orientation in places? What are some of the feelings of ambivalence, pleasure, power, shame, objectification, and solidarity that women have about bodies, their shape, flows, and capacities?”
For Marino, the photograph creates a regenerative, near-therapeutic space for these complex, mutating elements of the female experience to play out. “In an exploration of unsettling truths, the contortion of the body serves as a conduit to manifest the intangible,” she explains. “My aim is to uncover layers of meaning beneath the surface and express feelings like chaos, endurance, reaction, enlightenment and perseverance.”
In an era where abortion laws threaten women’s rights, invading the body and denying it autonomy, the spirit of rebellion that charges through New Moons invokes the photographer’s hopes for the future. Or as the photographer describes it: an “inner eclipse that encourages the rebirth of women in the role of advocate for themselves.”