Andres Serrano is an American photographer born in New York City on August 15th, 1950. Now I wouldn't normally feel a need to mention that he was from a half Honduran, half Afro-Cuban background and raised a strict Roman Catholic, but in this instance it becomes quite relative to a lot of the imagery he went on to produce. Originally working as an assistant art director for an advertising firm it wasn't until 1983 when he began to produce his own work before eventually achieving notoriety for such works as Piss Christ, in which he chose to photograph a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of his own urine, and Blood & Semen II ....you get the idea ? He's big on bodily fluids, enough said. Forever ready to court controversy he has also produced work featuring 'cheeky' nuns, burns victims and morgue dwellers. yes, the dead.
What really impresses me about Serrano is more of his straight up portrait work, such as that of Klansmen, where he met and photographed various members of The Klan and in it's reveals more about their hypocrisy towards their beliefs than anything, and also his work Portraits de la Comédie Française in which he produced something like 160 portraits, shooting with his Mamiya RZ67 to achieve a series of those close up shots with an attention to the finer details of his subjects. When it comes down to his America series, then that is when his work really captures my attention as it features 112 portraits of some well known, and some less so, Americans in a celebration of life after 9 1 1 on what I take to be seen as the inability of a external force to break the spirit of the American people despite what atrocities they may be faced with. You can see in many of his portraits that the use of a reflector under the chin to reduce shadowing also helps bring out the humanity in the face of the subject and leaves you with an impression of truthful and strong. The final thing I will add about Serrano is that when asked which is his favourite work he would reply it's always his last one, which, if more than anything else, informs us that he isn't done yet and strives to go on producing quality works whether or not we agree or not with his chosen subject matter.....for me I'm happy to appreciate the quality in his portraits so he can keep his bodily fluids to himself.
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| Johnny, Nomads, 1990 |
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| Walter Fischer, America, 2002 |
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| Michel Vuillermoz, C de F, 2007 |
So that's Sorrano, but if you feel you could do with a little more then you could check out a few of his more 'shocking' images that I mentioned earlier which are on show at the Saatchi Gallery and then of course there's always good old youtube if you fancy a visit to the morgue.
Now with John being John, we were then lead into the studio to try our own hand and reproducing something in the style of Serrano. The set up was pretty much as seen below with the idea being that the backdrop was lit up evenly yet the model was asked to face towards a single oblong softbox so there was an even distribution of a soft yet bright light across his face with a bounce reflector being used to try and balance out any severe shadowing. This shot of the other Jon was taken with a Leaf medium format camera with the instruction being to pin point the focus on the eye lashes, which I succeeded in doing (blows own trumpet), even though personally I've always gone for the eyeball as a focal point but I'm guessing that because of it's varying levels of opacity, eyelashes would offer a much more positive focal point.
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| ISO 50 1/18s |
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