Samaras

About this book

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 Samaras 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 photographys 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 Samarass work. "Samaras split himself into model actor director audience and critic " Lifson writes. "To each of these roles he brought a skilled artists 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."