
Mabel, Betty & Bette
- Publisher
- Kominek Books / Newfave
- Year
- 2021
- Specifications
- Softcover with dust jacket
23 x 29 cm
148 pages
3 double gatefolds
Edition of 500 copies, signed and numbered
Design by Alex Wiederin, Buero New York
Text by Yelena Yemchuk and Sara VanDerBeek
Mabel, Betty & Bette is an exploration of the often elusive nature of identity. In this series of images and in the film of the same title, the female figure acts as a threshold between two worlds. Mabel, Betty & Bette explores female archetypes as both actual bodies and mythic spaces upon which projections of self and society fall. In particular, Yemchuk focuses on moments of change, crisis or loss of self as embodied by an expanding cast of over 50 women photographed in carefully chosen places that have charged artifice evoking both the familiar and bizarre. Yemchuk constructs and captures the amnesiac moment when the dreamer wakes; an intersection between parallel universes; the alarm and confusion that accompany the void between dreaming and waking. She has created three fictional women, Mabel, Betty and Bette. Each photograph portrays one of the three women as conveyed by a cast member in one of three corresponding wigs.