Tag: #davidsamuelstern

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David Samuel Stern: Does a portrait need a subject?

Stern positioning two fabric-wrapped models during a shoot in Chelsea in 2022. Photo by Jaymye Thomas

In 2018, I interviewed David Samuel Stern about his process of creating woven photographic portraits. In these portraits, he interlaced photographs into intricate, tactile artworks, emphasizing the medium’s tangible qualities. Stern has been relentlessly exploring what it means to portray through photography and the medium’s place as a recorder of time and nature. Since our initial interview, he has produced captivating new work. Here, we survey his evolution over the last six years and his current work.

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David Samuel Stern’s Portraits: The Mechanics of Longing

For photographer David Samuel Stern’s photography typically serves as a departure point for crafting tangible objects. In his Woven Portraits series for instance, Stern physically assembles pieces of his photographic portraits into new forms, aiming to fuse the notion of photographic representation with its own material nature, making a new essence. The imagery in this series may bring to mind Cubists’ and Futurists’ paintings, or David Hockney’s Polaroids, but in Stern’s  hybrid artworks, the imagery derives from a photographer’s imagination and can be distinctly traced to our digital age – the manual  counterpoints the virtual. Here Stern shares with Art Spiel some of his ideas, process, and projects.

Aaron; 2015; Photographic prints on archival translucent vellum, physically cut and woven together; 40 x 31 x ¼ in, 101.5 x 78.75 x 1.25 cm; Courtesy David Samuel Stern

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