Photographing Ophelia: Myth and Concept in Eugènia Balcells’s Ophelia (variacions sobre una imatge)

Abstract This essay examines the groundbreaking work of Catalan art photographer Eugènia Balcells’s 1979 black and white series, Ophelia (variacions sobre una imatge) as an act of feminist re-appropriation of one of the most popular subjects of Victorian painting and early photography. Baleei Is reclaims the canonical literary character by reproducing John Everett Millais’s famous Ophelia (1852) in 37 black-and-white photocopies, then manipulating each of the images in ways that both reveal and resist the patriarchal constructs that informed earlier artists’ view of Shakespeare’s heroine as submissive, passive, ethereal-dead, asleep or in a melancholy trance. After a careful historical contextualization of nineteenth century images of Ophelia in painting and in commercial photography, Keefe Ugalde engages in a close reading of a dozen or more of Balcells’s images, explaining how the artist relied on postmodern conceptual art practices to critique, disparage or subvert the ways in which Ophelia served to anchor patriarchal representations of women, and particularly young desirable women, to traditional models of submissive femininity.