Suellen Parker

It's an ironic feature of contemporary photography. The harder the genre works to convince skeptics that it is a legitimate art form -- the equal of painting or sculpture -- the further away it gets from even being classifiable as pure photography.

Take Suellen Parker.

The Atlanta-based photographer is one of the many photographers whose work will be featured in this October's eighth annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography event, a month-long celebration of the form.

"I don't care what category I'm in. I know it's photographic, but I do most of it in the computer," admits Parker, offering a tour of the Decatur space where she works on her own projects and runs a digital fine-art printing business, Parker Editions.

When she first entered the graduate program at New York's School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 2001, Parker remembers class discussions about whether or not digitally manipulated photography could be lumped in with traditional photography.

But Parker says digital imagery is "so everywhere now," that the debate has really dried up. Thanks to the work of such artists as Loretta Lux and Anthony Goicolea, computer-generated imagery is now part of photography's cutting edge. And Parker's methods also align her with the avant-garde, as testified to by her photo spread this past spring in the New York Times Magazine and her inclusion in reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow, a book and exhibition spotlighting young photographers in whose methods the digital revolution looms large.

To create her spooky, psychologically murky digital images, Parker first builds plasteline clay sculptures of tiny people loaded with what Freud would call the "uncanny" -- the creepy sensation of looking human without being human.

After Parker has shaped and poked one of her clay people into the desired form, she then photographs them. And if the process ended there, we would understand clearly why Parker is called a photographer.

But this is where a conventional notion of photography gets complicated. Like a special-effects-crazed movie director shooting real actors on blue screen, Parker inserts her clay effigies into her computer where -- thanks to the wonders of Photoshop -- she paints on their clothing and gives them features plucked from magazines. She inserts backdrops and props drawn from any number of real and imaginary places. The genre becomes fuzzy.

Is it digital art? Sculpture? Photography?

Parker then prints the assemblage of cut-and-pasted photographic elements into a digital image that ratchets up the uncanny thing to an earsplitting decibel.

The effect is probably closer to one of Parker's admitted influences, animator Jan Svankmajer's work, than anything as quintessentially photographic as something by Robert Mapplethorpe or Walker Evans.

"Frankly, I think a lot of my inspiration comes from painters, people who draw, and performers," she says.

The idea of performance is actually central to Parker's current body of work, Incurable Perfection, part of which currently hangs in a small antechamber of Buckhead's Jackson Fine Art as part of Atlanta Celebrates Photography, and which will constitute her first solo show this winter at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in Manhattan.

In Incurable Perfection, Parker's images of smiling clay men undergoing Botox treatments or attending self-help seminars examine the divide between our pulpy human insides -- where we long to look beautiful, be loved and feel good -- and our imperfect outsides epitomized by her mottled, scabby-textured clay figures.

"I find it fascinating," Parker says. "I think for many people, it takes up a good part of their thoughts, about how you present yourself."

We live, essentially, in a culture of impersonators and drag queens, longing to hide behind a mask that conceals our true identity. It doesn't seem irrelevant to note that Parker's mentor at SVA was drag queen Justin Bond, who since 1993 has been playing the boozy, sloppy, over-the-hill lounge singer Kiki in the long-running drag cabaret show "Kiki & Herb." (He also appears in the upcoming film Shortbus.) Bond's act -- played for humor instead of poignance -- is founded on the sad slippage of a once-sexy lady's maquillage, as her saucy disco numbers saunter into the Liza Minnelli zone of the tragic, the drunken and the lewd.

"He talked about character development," Parker says of her mentor sessions with Bond, which perhaps motivated her interest in doing extensive research on plastic surgery before beginning Incurable. He told her to "know their whole story even if you don't tell the whole story."

"I try to think about these characters as people, and a lot of time they're based on people I know, or people I think I know," she says, like a fiction writer basing her novel on impressions drawn from real life.

And if photography, since its beginning, has always fetishized "the real," then the ideas Parker is dishing out about the way we live now are real in the extreme -- whether you want to call them photographs or not.