David Seidner
"Visages de l'Art contemporain"

For over 15 years David Seidner has photographed artists among the most important in contemporary art. This exhibition presents a selection of 50 portraits

Born in Los Angeles in 1957, David Seidner began exhibiting his photographs in 1978 at the age of twenty-one, two years after his first published magazine cover. For several years, he was under exclusive contract to the house of Yves Saint Laurent. His work appears regularly in Vanity Fair and New York Times Magazine. David Seidner has written extensively on art for Bomb Magazine and French Vogue.

"In this series of portraits of artists I tried, by asking myself what was the most iconographic form of portraiture in the history of art, to portray my subjects like ancient Roman busts. I found that the classical idiom of the frontal bust, that is, head and neck, lent itself well to a flat portrayal through the use of photography. Impressed by galleries of antiquities, by the haunting rows of vacant expressions, full the suggestion of complex lives, I sought to relate a certain fullness, or richness of expression by asking my subjects to empty their minds and concentrate on the blackness of the lens, an abstract, non-subject.

This is aided by doing the portraits in a darkened room, on a black background, the subject also covered in black, where there is nothing to distract. The subject's face is thus isolated and floating in blackness. I strive for an expression of nothingness so that the spectator can attribute everything. I work with repetition, as I always have. There are variations in the way the subjects are lit, but the scale, format, and composition are always identical. The definition of form through light becomes extremely important. When the portraits are exhibited side by side, a kind of vocabulary is created. It is also a study of sameness and metamorphosis..

This sameness is interupted by the difference of the eyes. Working in this idiom, I tried to meet the challenge of making something so classical, personal. The classical aspect is enhanced by printing the portraits in platinum, on watercolor paper, so that they look more like engravings than photographs. My favorite comment so far has been: "These portraits could be used for minting coins". David Seidner

On the occasion of this exhibition a catalogue: Visages de l'Art Contemporain - texts by Davis Seidner - will be published by Gina Kehayoff's edition with la Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

David Seidner, June 1996