The photographs mark the changes affecting the structure of the family nucleus. The events of life are cumulated in each series, tragedies and traumas registered on the body, which become a passionate photographic subject. The photographs’ arrangement gives rise to an absent figure, eliminated from the pictures, yet present in the empty space. Bleier’s line-up attests to changes in the course of time – a family biography depicted “through the feet”.
The obsessive preoccupation with the form of the toes is a shared interest in Bleier’s family, a private joke, by virtue of which she gathered her family for a group photograph in 1997. When her son was born, the first thing she examined carefully was his toes. She attests: “When they put my son on my soft, emptied belly, I had to look at his feet, at the shape of his toes, to explore the product of our new genetic ‘cross’.”
In the winter of 2002, when the family structure changed, Bleier once again gathered the family in its new make-up for a shoot. She has been committed ever since: “The body of work seems to haunt me, lurking. It is always there, waiting, knowing something before I do, and not telling.” The next event is thus registered on film, registered on the body, and thus the series will continue to evolve.
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