Faculty member Amy Arbus has a solo show After Images at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
Amy Arbus uses photography to evoke classical paintings, bringing the subjects to life with this series of twenty four color photographs. After Images is a series that was made in 2011 and 2012 in which Arbus paid homage to the late, great painters such as Cezanne, David, Ingres, Modigliani and Picasso. She was inspired by paintings that she had visited during her childhood in New York, images that defined painting for a generation, and moments of looking that collapsed the boundaries between public and private space. After she began photographing her biggest challenges were how to create extremely soft lighting, skewed perspectives, Picasso’s elongated fingers and Modigliani’s incredibly long necks. It was in solving these problems that she found her greatest rewards.
“I chose portraits that I found emotionally intense and heartbreakingly beautiful,” says Arbus. She then photographed actor friends and other models to reflect those paintings.
“Re-enacting a painting requires a very deliberate kind of scrutiny,” Arbus says. “It felt like dissecting and re-assembling. I was always too intimidated to create portraits in the style of another photographer, yet ironically with this series, in taking liberties from the original, I feel I was able to make my most unique body of work yet…“When people first see them, they aren’t sure if they are looking at paintings or photographs.”
Arbus describes her technique. “I learned how to create very soft lighting, imitate the skewed perspectives in the paintings and which colors for skin wouldn’t translate well into photography,” she says. “It wasn’t until I was on the set that I felt like I knew exactly what I wanted.”
Arbus says she and the actors discussed what might have been happening in the life of the subject of the painting to access a level of empathy. “To me, they are paintings come to life,” she says.
“Amy Arbus…leaps right into the ago-old tussle between paintings and photography by audaciously re-staging for her camera some of modernism’s most iconic avant-garde portraits. Her astonishing and pitch-perfect pictures say as much about the sweetly treasured past of paintings as they do about the unpredictably hybrid future of photography,” writes Brian Wallis, Chief Curator, International Center of Photography.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amy Arbus has had 25 solo exhibitions worldwide and published five books including the award winning On The Street 1980-1990. Hilton Als described The Fourth Wall as her masterpiece in The New Yorker.
Her photographs have appeared in and on the covers of periodicals such as The Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg News, French Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, People, New York Magazine, and Aperture. Advertising clients include Chiat/Day, Cone and Belding, Saatchi & Saatchi, New Line Cinema, Nickelodeon, and Marina Rinaldi. Arbus has been teaching portraiture at the International Center for Photography for 20 years and at Anderson Ranch and NORDphotography.
Her photographs are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The New York Public Library; The National Theater, Oslo, Norway; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; The Richard Avedon Foundation, New York. Arbus is represented by The Schoolhouse Gallery in Massachusetts.
