Thursday, February 17, 2011

Contemporary Photographer



Kristan Horton

Kristan Horton was born in Canada in 1971. He studied at Guelph University and the Ontario College of Art and Design. He considers himself an artist and his best known as a mixed-media artist, but when he won the Grange Prize for Photography (a hefty $50,000 prize) he had to rethink his talents. He is working more with layering and manipulating photographs and also photographs his abstract visual art.





“in fact, I’ve never even considered myself a photographer. But having said that, I seem to have come closer to photography, very close, as a medium [that] I’m using every single day...”

His prize was for his humorous series called Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove, which is based off the movie, and shapes what we think of reality, shapes, and cultural artifacts. He takes basic objects in a comfortable room and transforms them into distant places and scenes. He used black and white to capture the essence of the film and at first glance you can't tell them apart. This use of recreating the scene shows us the capacity photography has in being able to recreate reality. It makes you rethink and redefine what exactly "real scenes" are.

Photography, he observed, “is a tool that helps me answer philosophic itches . . . about perception, representation and self-representation . . . questions about being in the world.”




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