Bunny

Bunny documents a project by the internationally renowned photographer Polly Borland. This publication is produced in conjunction with the exhibition ?Bunny’ which will take place at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in 2008. It takes the viewer through an assemblage of photographs of a giant woman called Gwen that explore femininity and deconstruct the idea of the bunny girl of the playboy world.

The book constructs the ?Bunny’ story with pictorial intelligence and an understanding of the full potential of photography as art form with narrative displacement and construct. Bunny also includes a witty and seductive short poem by Nick Cave, and an equally funny and eccentric modern fairytale by Will Self: ?Well now, the bunny was a silly thing and not quite right. She didn’t look like a proper bunny, she had pink fur and her muzzle was sort of bulgy and cartoonish.”

A leading portrait photographer before moving to the UK from her native Australia in 1989, Polly Borland has earned her reputation for specializing in stylized portraiture and off-beat reportage. She shoots regularly for numerous UK and US publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Independent and Dazed and Confused. In 1994 she won the prestigious John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, and a selection of photographs from The Babies was exhibited at the South Bank’s Meltdown Festival in 1999, curated that year by Nick Cave. The National Portrait Gallery in London and Australia have acquired a number of Borland’s photographs for it’s collection, and in 2000 both exhibited a solo show of her work. Powerhouse published her first book ?The Babies’ in 2001 with an essay by Susan Sontag. In that same year she was one of eight chosen photographers to photograph the Queen for her Golden Jubilee. Michael Hoppen Contemporary will exhibit her ?Bunny’ project in 2008 ? a series of portraits of a giant girl called Gwen.