Anthony Goicolea: the manipulation of identity

Anthony Goicolea is a multidisciplinary American artist, of Cuban origins, born in 1971. 

Goicolea is therefore not just a photographer, but I have focused on his narrative and photographic content (in his photographic works from 1999 to 2004) which mainly concern the transition phase from adolescence to adulthood. 

With all the implications concerning identity, sexuality, taboos and the provocative reaction to stereotypes.

Often the protagonists of his shots are adolescents who, despite the citation of conformist symbols such as the uniform used in schools, are inserted into dreamlike and surreal staging, sometimes ironic.

https://www.anthonygoicoleastudio.com/albums/past-works-1999-2004/content/after-dusk/

(accessed on 04/01/2022)

The images are digitally manipulated in order to allow the author to embody the different characters portrayed, or to self-clone.

https://www.anthonygoicoleastudio.com/albums/past-works-1999-2004/content/morning-after/
(accessed on 04/01/2022)

Anthony Goicolea's work, although made for the public, is focused on himself, similarly to other authors such as Cindy Sherman and Martin Liebscher.

Goicolea masks, as does Cindy Sherman, his personality; he disguises, hides and manipulates it, in search of one or several identities.

The incarnation of each of the characters could pursue different purposes: to "get out" of himself so that the work has its own identity, to declare the group as a mass with no personal identity, to affirm the uncanny and the restlessness of adolescence, without however having to engage any teenage models.

https://www.anthonygoicoleastudio.com/albums/past-works-1999-2004/content/blizzard/
(accessed on 04/01/2022)

The recurring themes are the mirror, the double, the multiple, the Narcissus, the mask, the manipulation of identity.

Goicolea, using himself as a multiplied model, in order for this "new individual" to act in different ways and attitudes, obtains that we perceive him as a group and that the multiple identities are a non-identity, almost to quote "One, none, one hundred thousand " by Giovanni Pirandello.