In Freaks, the classic film by Tod Browing, we are walked through a world of disquieting anatomical rarities where abnormality is the standard. It is 1932, the golden age of the “Freak Show”; dark times when the exploitation of human deformity for entrainment purposes was commonplace. There is no doubt that this approach to physiognomic differences is extremely insulting and derogatory, but perhaps the interesting question does not lay in how the circus viewed them but in the audience's psyche: Why pay to see humans that are different to us? 
	It is impossible to ignore the attraction that we feel for what is biologically eccentric. The weird shapes, the duplicated appendices, the missing parts, the especially big, the surprisingly small and the characteristically unique are all features that awake our curiosity. This curiosity is not, in itself, a value judgement nor does it imply a moral preconception. The problem arises when a negative connotation is stitched to this natural fascination.  
	The intention of the exhibition Imperfect Portraits is to rescue some of the protagonists from that questionable era when humans were the shows' main attractions. Old photographs are reinterpreted to rescue and revalue the identity of those historic characters captured by the camera. In changing the media, from photo to drawings and sculptures, the morbid exploitation emphasized in the original image for advertising purposes is eliminated and, in some way, gives the photographed characters their proper place as persons. In the end, imperfection deserves to be portrayed as much as beauty. In a most famous sequence of Browing’s film, the Freaks sing to the character of normal appearance: we accept her as one of us, we accept her as one of us… It’s open to each of us how we answer this invitation.

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Imperfect Portraits