Artist Spotlight: Photographer - David Samuel Stern
He was born in 1982 in Highland Park, Illinois and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is a contemporary artist, photographer and teacher and for the last several years has focused heavily on portraits. His work attracts huge audiences due to the way in which he translates a photograph and portrait into a tangible object.
I have chosen to focus mainly on his weaving technique as it ties in nicely with my gender theme and mixing genders as I would like to weave a male and female together in photoshop and possibly in 3D to see if I could create a similar effect.
This artist relates to my theme because while each single print by itself depicts a subject at rest, when woven together, the final result appears to be a human figure in motion. I felt this would work really well with transitioning between male and female. Another aspect that Stern has used is that of the creative process which involves blurring the boundaries between one’s self and others in order to try on different identities and their identities to become blurred in the final image, which I felt was perfect when looking at challenging gender norms and identities.
In Stern’s own words, these images “are an attempt to bridge dignified, direct portraits with a sort of abstraction that allows their subjects to hide within themselves, and the photographs to be distinctly physical objects. In hiding some things, we reveal others.” This is plain to see in my images of Beth & Oscar, and the slices I used through their faces. I could identify some parts of Oscar and bring through parts of Beth also, thus weaving their identities together, male and female, gender neutral.
I think this artist worked from observation of the images he took and imagination to bring the images to life in his own way through the use of photography, photoshop and weaving the prints.
I find this artist interesting because these images are the result of physically weaving together two photographic prints of the same subject.
Stern's work is ghostly, intriguing and almost life like and I think this is due to the effect that the weaving has created. He demonstrates that weaving can encompass more than the interlacing of simple threads and tactile fabrics. This ancient craft can also be used to design dynamic and thought-provoking images. I love the textures that come from the weave which Stern describes as being rhythmic, what a great description for an image.
David Stern's work reminds me of David Hockney and Hannah Hoch, two artists that have done series of art work using collage. I will look more into their work and think about how this blends in to my theme and concept of gender fluidity, challenging gender norms and gender identities.
Through my concept I plan to produce sets of images using images I take of masculine women and feminine men and combining their faces to mix their genders. I also plan to interview each person and create a front cover of a magazine using captions from what they have said regarding gender as storylines. This is to examine, question and criticise the relationships between gender and society.
Examples of Stern's work.
In my first attempt at a weave I did quite big strips of paper using contrasting feminine and masculine colours. I like the way this turned out but would like to develop further using faces.
This was my second attempt at weaving but my 1st attempt using magazine faces. Again using a bigger weave and using a male and a female face to mix together. I was a little disappointed with how this turned out and what I would like to do next is a smaller weave so it shows the faces a little more and detail.
Examples of other weaving in photography for inspiration...
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