In SNAP, Sprigle fundamentally changes the way we understand the beauty of the accidental moment. These images of rough elegance are reminiscent of the attenuated figures, movement and tension of Baroque Paintings. Yet, the characteristics are random--products of ostensible lighting conditions. The photos, Sprigle's newest series, are a visual essay about our instant culture. About a new aesthetic that arises from the intersection of cheap consumer technology and art. He presents a sanctioned voyeurism: reality tightly cropped, frontally composed and blurred by time to become unexpectedly beautiful. His color pallet, seemingly based in oil paint rather then photographic grain, is drawn from the Impressionistic Masters. Sprigle's work examines the way light rearranges an almost-classical memory of the human form.
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Editorial Reviews
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"Sprigle's images are extremely intimate ... the dark lighting, the flaws and the blurred images... add ...dimension ..." -- Gay People's Chronicle, Cleveland, OH February 2, 2000
"These bodies, caught undressing, holding up their hard cocks for our admiration, are captured as pure sexual impulse." -- Jim Eigo, Playguy Magazine, June 2004
"These bodies, caught undressing, holding up their hard cocks for our admiration, are captured as pure sexual impulse." -- Jim Eigo, Playguy Magazine, June 2004
From the Publisher
In 1917, French Artist Marcel Duchamp, one of the founding fathers of post-modern expression, signed a toilet and called it art. David Sprigle photographs nudes with a toy camera and calls it a book.
Like Duchamps's toilet, Sprigle's art arises from within the sphere of domesticity: he uses one of those instant cameras often advertised in the context of a children's birthday party to capture young adults prancing about his Venice Beach home. You will not know them for they are NOT celebrities, but his subjects are people who comprise the mundane fabric of a typical Los Angeles life.
(My mother used to say that all of the freaks in the United States are drawn to California, in California, they're drawn to Venice Beach. I learned quickly that these freaks make money by selling things to tourists.)
Sprigle asks his subjects to take off their clothes. To get hard. To jump up and down. This "deviant" activity is captured via blurry timeslices from his Polaroid camera. The photographs reveal Sprigle's magic--where a crisp, clear reality, after the familiar click and whir of the mechanism, becomes instantly muddled and somehow, unexpectedly beautiful.
Sprigle engages his models in redemptive fantasies. His manner seems European, most probably German: derived from artists who, seeking freedom from past public indiscretions, proclaim deviant sexuality and eroticism. Sprigle invites his subjects to reveal and accept their own, often suppressed eroticism as art. I have seen people reluctant to bare themselves soon revel in the liberating experience of prancing around naked for someone who acts more like a therapist than a photographer. The camera is almost superfluous as Sprigle's confident and bold banter validates the fact that...
...his subjects, and most-likely each one of us... is a bit of a freak... sometimes aberrant. Pure and simple.
But like Duchamp's toilet, this aberrance is ubiquitous and essential to our livelihood: for we all must express.
A post-modern aesthetic often mandates fucking things up. The imperfect / accidental / unexpected allows us critical distance from our modernist longings for definitive answers--for that prior simplicity, predictability and the safety of our mother's wombs. With things fucked up, we are forced to establish new paths to resolution and understanding: to abandon the systematic... to be reborn unto ourselves.
Soon we realize that the nagging desire to conform to the principles implanted in us by ideological state apparatuses--religion, politics, entertainment, family--often holds us down. One of Sprigle's subjects, while jumping up and down, with a big boner shamelessly slapping around says with veritable glee, "I guess I'll never be president now." Wryly, Sprigle responds, "Well, if that happens, l will sell you the photos for millions."
He will not have to.
Given a comfortable, casual location, and a machine which instantly renders some sort of record, both photographer and subject have affirmed erotic expression, all for the sake of creating blurry splotches of color on a plastic card.
The photos, striking testaments to the physical movement accompanying this sudden liberation, are small and intimate. And ironically, in the shadow of perhaps the biggest state apparatus, Hollywood (which broadcasts its stiff righteousness in large, visual perfection yet secrets its deviance in tabloids designed to be discredited), Sprigle presents these tiny, seemingly insignificant records of aberrance as art--jubilant manifestations of momentary personal autonomy. Apparatuses of empowerment.
Sprigle could be anyone. He should be your friend. The one with the camera who asks you to do silly things for his lens, then shows you the result as you laugh and ask for a copy.
Personalizing entertainment makes poor revenue, however, for companies in the business of selling it. The widespread acceptance of fame as that attained only by the few has long undermined personal expression. In undertaking his venture in this modern mecca of commodified culture called Los Angeles, Sprigle hides in a dying demon's pocket. Armed with cheap consumer technology and ostensible lighting conditions, he slyly elevates anonymous naked bodies to myth.
Yet what you will find here are ultimately photos of friends fooling around. And while the photographs created can be wholly disconnected from the context of their creation, the honesty of the exchange between photographer and subject lies latent in the abstract exposure of flesh. Make this a guidebook to realize that art--not as a business but as a feeling and experience--is often unexpected, uninhibited and aberrant. Really, though, just simply personal.
Stephen Patrick Foery, Editor Los Angeles, August 1999
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"A Touch of Impressionism",
By
This review is from: Snap : Photographs by David Sprigle (Hardcover)
I think my attraction to impressionistic oil paintings was the main reason I was drawn to this exciting book of Polaroid photos of mostly male nude models (a few females are included) by David Sprigle. In viewing impressionistic paintings, there is always that feeling of visual discovery when you back away from the landscape/portrait and realize the clarity that is taking place in front of your very eyes. The blurred becomes the beautiful image. Well, that's certainly true in this exciting book of instant photos David has taken of his subjects, people who are not celebrities but everyday men and women, whom he has asked to have some fun in front of his camera by jumping up and down, posing, and intimately touching their bodies. What you get as a result is not just a candid photo but an image that is almost like an impressionistic painting. It's simply beautiful and pleasing to the eye. These are bold images of excited models that demand your complete attention.This is a very special book because it features a new style and type of photography of the male nude. There are over 50 pages of instant color photos in this book. There is a creative introduction by Arthur Tress that is quite interesting. This book is beautifully bound, and printed by Fotofactory Press, a company that David started back in 1990. As a avid collector of male nude photography books, I know that each and every book carefully selected and published by FotoFactory is of high quality, perfectly bound and printed on quality paper. Highly Recommended! Be sure to check out these other FotoFactory Press male nude photography books; California Boys, The Wild Ones, Male of the Species, and the Anthology Series, Volume 1-4, featuring many different photographs of this genre.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fun with Point and Click,
By scribbler1 "scribbler1" (Atlanta, GA 30305) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Snap : Photographs by David Sprigle (Hardcover)
In the post-modern art world, a cheap Polaroid camera is all one needs to become a master photographer. Well, that and people who are willing to take off their clothes and move around while you're shooting them.In "Snap," David Sprigle's very interesting collection of such photos, the subjects gleefully strip and masturbate, strip and jump up and down, strip and move doing almost anything while they are the focus of Sprigle's lens. The often blurry results are sometimes erotic (which works) and sometimes hard to comprehend (which doesn't always). But that is only the critical first judgment of the eye - take a second, less critical approach, and comparisons to Impressionism and oil paintings can be made. Like all unposed photography, "Snap" captures the raw, unselfconscious moments of human behavior so convincingly and beautifully that it raises voyeurism to the level of art. Whether is an image of a man sitting on a toilet or the rather large genitalia of an anonymous subject swinging between his legs, the moments captured by Sprigle are real and unguarded. His models unabashedly perform seemingly mundane tasks, like lighting a cigarette, and with Sprigle's artistry, the act is elevated to a new level. Though Sprigle's work may be influenced by our "instant culture," these images and their beauty recall older art forms like Impressionism, but the grainy Polaroid film (and burgeoning erections) tinge them with a modern quality. The inner jacket of the book features a quote by Brassai: "Beauty is not the intent of creation, but the reward." It's a perfect statement to represent this collection by Sprigle, in which art comes first, and the results are a secondary concern. Happily, the results in this case are quite rewarding.
5.0 out of 5 stars
From the Publisher & a Critic,
By Earl R. Sutton "earlsutton" (Detroit, MI, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Snap : Photographs by David Sprigle (Hardcover)
"David Sprigle's unique images in SNAP, are the most experimental and abstract published by FotoFactory Press. Using a 'ordinary' Polaroid camera, Sprigle captures everyday people in everyday situations. These are not famous people or perfect models, but regular folk engaging in daily rituals from waking up to making love to sharing a cigarette. Images of women are included here.
"'Sprigle's images are extremely intimate and the dark lighting, the flaws and the blurred images of motion being captured, adds a multitude of dimension to his images. Sprigle's work cannot be glanced over like mush of the eye candy around. Rather one has to stare long at these images and creep under the layers to get at the heart of these images. And rough as these photos seem, there is a luminescent beauty to them as they celebrate the daily minutia of living as part of the human species.'--Kaizaad Kotwal "Longtime friend and fellow photographer Arthur Tress introduces this 96-page clothbound volume which also includes a provocative essay on Sprigle's cultural significance by filmmaker Stephen Patrick Foery." 49 Color Plates
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