N*** Reagan

The photographs are discordant and grotesque, portraying changing bodies beneath the endless repetition of one mask. John Brian King photographed twenty-three models with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 camera in an empty office. Each model wore the same Ronald Reagan mask, striking any pose she liked. Deliberately unsettling, these photographs depict Reagan as a demon and specter haunting the modern world. Evoking the dead conservative president, the models wear the hideous dark-eyed mask – anemic and wrinkled – and morph into unerotic, freakish wraiths. The colors of the photographs accentuate these figures’ eerie qualities: the camera’s unstable flash turns the bland office backdrop alternately into a mold green, a muddy gray, a brilliant white, or a dense, all-encompassing black setting. The women’s shadows are sometimes starkly present, and at other times disappear. The photographer was influenced by such disparate sources as Conrad Veidt’s grim grin in The Man Who Laughs; Reagan’s own frozen, Brylcreem-lathered satanic countenance; artist Maurizio Cattelan’s sardonic approach to politics in art; and Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Southern Gothic photographs of masked children.

“Indeed, Reagan as a symbol whose repercussions still feel forced upon American citizens makes for rather disquieting photography, particularly when they seek to highlight, as the press release describes, Reagan's ‘own frozen, Brylcreem-lathered satanic countenance’ against ‘mold green...muddy gray...brilliant white...[and] dense, all-encompassing black’ and resting imposingly atop displays of bare female triumph, self-presentation, and sexuality, complicating the country's fervent obsession with and the Right’s frequent rapturous praise of the former President. Here, he's both a grotesque imposition and an ugly seduction.” ― Flavorwire

20 cm x 20 cm hardcover, shrink-wrapped, 112 pages (107 color photos) — limited edition of 200 copies