Samaras - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0893812412 ISBN 13: 9780893812416

Publisher: Aperture, 1988

Synopsis

Photographer, painter, sculptor, Lucas Samaras is one of the most influential and provocative artists of our time. Once again available to readers, this long out-of-print volume presents a thorough compilation of Samara's photographic work, beginning with his earliest "Auto-Polaroids."

This exhaustive body of work paved the way for a generation of contemporary photo-artists, expanding the expressive possibilities of the medium. Using Polaroid materials, large--sometimes life-sized--formats, manipulated imagery, and composites, Samaras helped forge a vocabulary employed by artists and photographers throughout the eighties. In his most profound achievement, he adopted one of photography's basic genres--portraiture--and used it as a basis for an inquiry into the self, which remains unmatched in its intensity and boundless in its ramifications.

Photography critic Ben Lifson provides a trenchant critique and history of Samaras's work. "Samaras split himself into model, actor, director, audience, and critic," Lifson writes. "To each of these roles he brought a skilled artist's hand an an eye deeply informed by the historical traditions and motifs of art and by the vernacular and popular traditions of photography. He became a rare figure in American art, not an artist who occasionally uses photography for tactical reasons . . . but an artist who made photography central to his aesthetic campaign."

About this title

About the Author

Photographer, sculptor, painter, and performance artist, Lucas Samaras is one of the most influential and provocative artists of all time. In 1973, Samaras discovered that the wet dyes of Polaroid prints were highly malleable, allowing him to create what he calls "Photo-Transformations." His work has been exhibited widely at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and is held in major museum collections around the world.

Ben Lifson is a writer, critic, and photographer. His articles have appeared in many periodicals including Art in America, The Village Voice, Artforum, and Aperture. He is represented in the collections of the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, the National Museum of American Art, and the Minneapolis Art Institute.

Reviews

The Greek-born Samaras is a photographer, painter, and sculptor who makes his eccentrically cluttered Manhattan apartment the backdrop and subject of his flamboyant nude self-portraits and nude portraits of friends. Most of the images (well-reproduced here) are Polaroids that he began using in the 1960s, first in grid arrangements of small pictures, then as cut-and-assembled photographs, often with manipulated emulsions. His later work employs 20 x 24 film. Essayist Ben Lifson, the former Village Voice critic, traces the evolution of Samaras's expression and introduces each distinct stage of the artist's work. With a chronology and bibliography of books, exhibit catalogs, and articles. Kathleen Collins, Library of Congress
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0893812412
• ISBN 13: 9780893812416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184