WOVEN PORTRAITS

WOVEN PORTRAITS


CREDITS

GUP Author

GUP TEAM


Artist

David Samuel Stern

Artist Website

davidsamuelstern.com

It is the strange nature of photographic images that intrigues American photographer David Samuel Stern (1982): they have the unique ability to reflect the real, while being limited as two-dimensional, static pieces of ordinary matter. Portraiture, like photography itself, is charged of the impossible task of being simultaneously a reliable representation of the person portrayed as well as the recording of only a finite moment of time. Stern muses on the topic: “How strange that images have secured a nearly universal role as the fabric of portraiture.”

By physically weaving together two large-format photographic portraits printed on vellum, Stern’s sitters appear veiled by their own faces, highlighting the elusiveness of photographs as a medium and portraiture as a genre. The combination of multiple frames into each image gives the photograph a certain mystery, reminiscent of futurist paintings that attempted to capture multiple perspectives within a single view. These ‘woven portraits’ are at once rhythmically abstract, photographically objective, and tangible objects.