Marianna Rothen’s ultra dreamy, nostalgic photographs explore themes of womanhood, beauty, power, and domestic spheres. Many of them look as if they could have come straight out of the 1970s. With their gorgeous styling, the voluminous retro hairdos of cigarette-wielding housewives, the strange and slightly unnerving spaces that these glamorous beings seem to inhabit, Rothen’s images have a spontaneous feeling of the momentary, candid life caught on the move, yet at the same time a carefully composed, poised look. They are saturated in color and have a lush vagueness – the dreamy fading of the light around windows and skies suggests someone’s loveliest and most undying memories.
Many of Rothen’s photos make use of mannequins, emphasizing the uncanniness of the scenes she is capturing. The results are a mysterious and spectacularly beautiful depiction of the intimacy and eerie violence of a life seemingly lived in domestic obscurity – the drama of a psychological existence made up of husbands, babies, neighbors, girlfriends, isolation, eroticism, rebellion, and psychic death. The playful banditry in several of the tableaux, with the women holding knives and guns, seems to subvert the violent games of little boys – and the fact that only mannequins represent men is a reversal of the perceived doll-like nature of little girls who grow up to be wives and mothers.
