Gary Schneider

Gary Schneider is a South African Photographer who has been photography the portrait since the mid seventies. He earned a BFA from the University of Cape Town, in South Africa, then he made his way to America where he enrolled into graduate school at The Pratt Institute in New York City. His portraits are surreal to say the least. He uses long exposure of his subjects with mini spotlights to illuminate their bodies. His work mostly involves portraiture, he has recently done a series on self-portraiture called the genetic self portrait, where he got access to many different scientific microscope and equipment and photographed himself "genetically" with that equipment. That series was a critique on the Human Genome Project. Most of his portraits seems to add a sense of unreal to them, but the photograph are very real, they play with the idea of how we visually interpret someone and how one can reveal a person to us in such an abstract way. I wanted to research Gary Schneider because he works with portraits and self-portraits. Although, the biggest reason was how he was framing his photographs, they reminded me how i was framing my hockney-esque photographs and that's what really drew my attention towards him.


Gallery: http://www.stephendaitergallery.com
Interview or Review: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n10_v83/ai_17418156
website: can't find an official website