Grace Jones

The body as graphic form

Grace Jones moved between modeling, music and film. After working in New York and Paris as a model, she developed a recording career that included Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing and Slave to the Rhythm. Collaborations with Jean-Paul Goude and musicians Sly & Robbie helped shape different aspects of her recorded and visual work.

Her images can be studied through geometry: a sharp shoulder, a cropped hairstyle, a strong pose and the space around a body. A photograph or stage performance is a constructed image, with contributions from clothing, lighting and collaborators. Jones’s career makes those relationships unusually visible. It also resists a neat division between the person who wears fashion and the performer who actively transforms it.