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| Photographers
and filmmakers Mike and (twin brother) Doug Starn are known for their
distinctive torn and crumpled photographic images composed from multiple
fragments, tape, and other elements which might be discarded or avoided
in more traditional photography. The brothers invite aging effects
such as yellowing, and often seem to aim for the look of a well-worn
fresco. The images are often photographed from reproductions of Old
Master paintings or famous historical figures. These photographs can
rightly be considered hand-crafted sculptural objects. |
CRITICAL EXCERPTS
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Eleanor Heartney, ARTnews, 9/87
"The twins create photographic artworks that seem to defy all the
rules about proper handling of the photograph. Printed in off-color
sepia tones, often spattered with chemicals, their prints are then
cut, torn, scratched, and patched with scotch tape...the have the
feel of found objects that have been dug up from some 19th century
photo archive. There seems to be a deliberate effort to downplay
any reference to a specific period...The Starn Twins work is commonly
discussed in terms of their deconstruction of the medium of photography,
but it is their challenge to the idea of history that seems more
radical. Created only yesterday, these works have all the poignancy
of Barthes' death-drenched historical photographs...Both offer a
displacement away from the messy present toward a world whose beauty
is untouched by contingency or change."
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Jack Bankowsky, ARTFORUM, 1/89
"Instead of granting photography a conditional, ontological
specificity as a direct transcription of reality, the Starns foreground
the medium's constituent material qualities, reminding us that the
photograph is not a transparent window on the world. In support
of this primary conceit, they mobilize an array of formal devices...The
line that separates [in Winogrand's work] the garden variety snapshot
from the art photograph proved elusive, and the show's most potent
theme became the curator's inability to domesticate Winogrand's
verite-style production as art. The Starn's exacerbate photography's
uneasy relationship to art, but from an antithetical vantage...the
Starns seem almost wholly concerned with darkroom manipulations
and the register of the artist's hand. Though their sensitive photographic
manipulations at times generate real resonance, increasingly these
investigations are put to the service of secondary, even sophomoric
iconographic and formal impulses."
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