General & Miscellaneous American Art, Portraiture, History & Criticism - General & Miscellaneous Photography, General & Miscellaneous Sculpture, Abstract Art, Modern Art
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Overview
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."
"One of the most original, and certainly resourceful, artists of his generation." -- Architectural Digest
Editorials
Library Journal
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 CongressBook Details
Published
May 1, 1987
Publisher
New York, N.Y. : Aperture Foundation, c1987.
Pages
184
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780893812416