Portrait Mode - Harper's BAZAAR

Atong Atem’s artworks are a vibrant reclamation of ethnographic photography and a celebration of her South Sudanese heritage

When presented with the idea of face painting as a full-time career, most people likely imagine working at children’s parties or school fairs, painting butterflies and tigers on an endless rotation of sticky little faces to a soundtrack of crying, squealing and exhausted adults losing their patience.

Not Atong Atem: the Ethopian-born Melbourne-based artist found a more creatively fulfilling — and notably quieter — way to dedicate herself to face painting. “My introduction to face painting as an adult was as a very legitimate, highly skilled art practice,” she says. “Right out of high school, while I was studying architecture, I had a friend who was doing face painting as a full-time job. She trained me, and we would do face painting competitions together.”

Atem eventually left architecture behind to study painting at the Sydney College of the Arts and ended her studies at RMIT in Melbourne. “I was originally doing a lot of traditional oil painting portraits, but face painting was something I always gravitated towards,” she says. “It felt completely natural — an extension of the oil painting I was doing.” In the early days, the photography aspect of her work was an afterthought, a way of simply documenting what she’d painted, and limited to taking PhotoBooth pictures on her MacBook.

Atem explains that around this time, she was introduced to photography through an art history lens, specifically ethnographic photography of people in Africa. “The first images of Black people were ethnographic colonial images,” she explains. Shortly after the invention of photography in the late 1800s, white explorers and colonisers entered Africa with cameras instead of sketchbooks in order to capture the cultures they were seeing for the folks back home. While ethnography is considered an important part of anthropology, the process of ethnographic photography could be violent and exploitative, and the people in the images are often presented as objects of scientific fascination rather than as human beings. There are reports of photographers buying people, taking their photographs and then abandoning them.

“Then between the ’50s to the ’80s, there was this movement of photographers from the continent taking photos of themselves and their communities,” Atem explains. Photographers Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, who worked prolifically in Mali, West Africa, in the ’60s, are celebrated for their brilliantly staged studio portraits. Sidibé incorporated patterned backdrops that clashed or matched his sitters’ outfits, while Keïta’s portraits capture Bamako, the capital of Mali, as it transitioned from a French colony to an independent capital. “[That photography] just really changed my perspective,” Atem says. “I wanted to reference my own culture in my work, so those images and that history are a reference point for my photography.”

She began working with models, but then shifted back to painting on herself and incorporated photography as a crucial element of her artistic practice. “I love working with people, but it’s kind of unreasonable for me to ask my friends to come over at 5am because I’m awake and want to take photos,” she says with a laugh. “So I use myself as a model. My self-portraiture isn’t in the same exact realm as the portraits I take of others, but they’re in the same planet — maybe different continents on the same planet.”

Atem works in a riot of colour: her face paint can be incredibly detailed — coloured gradients and layers of pearls or diamontes — or simple and bold — one block colour for her face, another for her eyelids. She wears gem-coloured silks and sits in front of brilliantly patterned backdrops, gazing directly into the camera or looking away, lost in her thoughts.

“I usually have an idea of the colours I want to use, so I start from there, but the rest happens organically,” she says. “I am very detail-oriented, so I take my time.” One photograph can take anywhere between one and five hours, depending on the level of detail in the face paint. To help with concentration, she puts on old episodes of The Simpsons. “It’s a show I grew up on, so I can put it on and pay attention without having to give it 100 per cent of my attention, and then I can relax into the painting. It’s quite a meditative experience. I often don’t realise how much time has passed and then it’s 4 o’clock in the morning and I’m exhausted and I’m like, Do I even want to take photos of this anymore?” she says with a laugh.

In 2017, Atem was awarded the Mecca M-Power Scholarship, which is a joint initiative between the beauty giant and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) dedicated to empowering women in the arts, science, technology, engineering and social enterprise. Her star has ascended quickly since: her works have been exhibited nationally in the NGV Triennial, at the Monash University Museum of Art, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and internationally in New York, Milan and Amsterdam. She won the Melt Portrait Prize at the Brisbane Powerhouse in 2018, and New York photographic studio Light Work’s artist in residency in 2019. She has also been chosen by Head On Photo Festival 2022 to release a book of portraits based on her family photo album.

“I did a bunch of self-portraits, essentially imitating the photos that are in my family album — just me by myself, playing different characters in my family,” she says. “That was such a big fun, beautiful project.”

For this Harper’s BAZAAR series, Atem incorporated an edit of fine jewellery from Bvlgari, Cartier, Tiffany & Co. and Van Cleef & Arpels. “It was actually quite funny that I had all this beautiful, high-end jewellery on, because usually I have plastic costume jewllery from the op-shop that I fake to look real,” she says with a laugh. “So I had to keep reminding myself to be extra extra careful.”

An element of inherent beauty in her work is its temporality. Once the photograph has been taken and her face washed, the artwork no longer exists in a physical form. “It’s almost like the artwork is the performance of applying makeup, and the photography is just the documentation of it. The process is such a big part of it, and 99 per cent of the time I’m doing it alone, so it’s quite a personal, intimate performative experience.”

This article originally appeared in the December 2021 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.