Head brings together photographs taken by Danielle Neu over the past seven years. This body of work includes a diverse range of images: fish and other life forms captured in aquariums and cages; portraits of actors, performers, and artists, as well as fragments of their naked bodies; deserted interior spaces, among them a reconstruction of the bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Elvis Presley's airplane, the Lisa Marie, from which Neu isolates certain elements—bedroom, bathroom, cabin seats—their surfaces covered by a protective layer of plastic. Each image engages with postwar American cultural landscapes and discourses, particularly those of Hollywood, where the desire for fiction manifests within reality itself.
A shot of a male stripper's living room introduces the absence of the body; a plastic mannequin wearing an erotic costume appears alone, beside a bouquet of lilies. Neu's photographs establish a recurrent temporal and spatial dissociation between place and corporeality. In a Las Vegas club, lacquered walls reflect the metal poles, fake flowers, neon lights, and velvet seats. Switched-on television screens are reflected in a myriad of surfaces, producing a space of false depth, saturated with reflections, yet devoid of human presence.
Portraits, by contrast, are mostly constructed by narrowing the frame to focus on the face, confronting the viewer with each subject's character. Disconnected from any specific setting, they exist, like the entirety of this collection, in an undefined space, akin to a non-place: that of dream and drift.
—Hugo Bausch Belbachir
"If glamour entails a triumphant encounter with danger, these pictures fail: the pose is too tentative. . . . The pleasure, the horror".
—Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together (Scribner, 2025)
"Aquariums are another locale where the oxygen is scarce and there are plenty of windows. Neu photographed both an exotic fish shop in Maine and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. . . . There are surgeonfish, clownfish, an Oscar fish, a calico goldfish, an Angelfish, a Starry Night fish, a Blue Tang and a blind fish. The latter swims behind the glass, his eyes blanked out. He can't see, but he can breathe. For us, it's the opposite".
—Stephanie LaCava, author of Nymph (Verso, 2025)
Danielle Neu is an American photographer based in Los Angeles. Deeply committed to the darkroom and to the silver-gelatin printing process, her images convey a distinct cinematic breath. Her portraiture and fashion work has been published in Pop, Arena Homme+, Re-Edition, Document, Marfa Journal, AnOther Magazine, among others. She has collaborated with artists such as V. Vale, Flannery Silva, and Stephanie LaCava.
