Discovering Joseph O. Holmes’s work recently was a wonderful consequence of just wanting to browse some home decor art on 20×200. As soon as I saw those silhouettes against museum dioramas (two of my favorite things), I was hooked. I enjoyed reading about Holmes’s experience making pictures in the style of street photography (one that’s more controlled, slower) inside a museum hall. When the work was still new to me, I remember flipping through LCD on Homes’s website for a while and feeling like the images became less exciting. But when I zoomed out and saw the images as a grid, I realized the effect is there, in these soft, muted rainbow checkerboard fields. The background in each picture is a wash of glowing color or sometimes an abstract blur of lines – rarely an animal that one can just barely decipher. In the project as a whole, I really love how the humans pictured are always nondescript black shapes, and all the color and brightness is in the diorama scenes.
From the artist’s statement for amnh and LCD: Street photography is my passion – a wild mix of technical skill and social engineering, with every component changing and evolving second by second. The original “amnh” series was shot over a period of six weeks in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and spun my love of street photography into a radically different environment, a sort of off-the-street photography. The project carried me from sunlight into museum darkness, from rapid-fire to a zen-like slow motion, and forced me to rethink the whole process of stalking strangers. These images strip the components of traditional street photo down to the barest cues: silhouettes gazing out over vast, artificial veldts and jungles.
To create the images for the “LCD” series, I photographed visitors at New York’s American Museum of Natural History over a period of four months in 2008 and 2009. I based all choices about focus, white balance, color, contrast, etc. solely on the LCD screen that is captured in each image; the rest of the image was allowed to fall where it may. Other than those adjustments, the images are unaltered.
From “amnh”
From “LCD”
Visit artist's site: josephholmes.io
Posted October 26th, 2018
