Discussing warping and distortion in response to some photos I warped via a scanner here, a friend recommended I look up André Kertész as someone who played with distortion. A Google image search shows me an interesting selection of portraits that make the subjects look like stretched blu-tack or the rings of Saturn if they'd gone through a few spin cycles in a washing machine.
It's interesting to see an entire human form captured and moulded like play-doh into spooling, curving, looping abstract figures. It also reminds me, peripherally, of Jenny Saville's work and all sorts of fat acceptance stuff. A lot of popular fat acceptance stuff I see online has this vibe of sanitisation, of being just right - fat but the perfect shape of fat only, curves in the right places. There can be, within pro-fat spaces, a hierarchy of acceptable/appealing fatness. The connection between this and André's work also reminds me of the "lumps and bumps" Commes des Garcons s/s 1997 collection as analysed in an essay here by that friend who mentioned André.
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