About Me
My grandparents owned a travel agency when I was growing up in the 1980s and I remember how they would come visit us after every trip and my grandfather would sit down at the kitchen table and meticulously clean his Konica Model A and Konica Model T cameras.
In 1999, my grandfather gave me those cameras. From those first Konicas, through my Pentax K1000, Pentax PZ-1P, Nikon F1, Nikon D200, Ricoh GR, Nikon D800e, Ricoh GR IV, Leica Q, Hasselblad 500c, and including my Rolleiflex 2.8 (and my beloved Ilford Fp4 plus and Fuji Velvia), every camera on which I have ever learned is still functioning. And still in use by me. I take pride in that, as well as in the fact that I learned photography on a manual camera. However, other than dark room classes at an art co-op in Washington DC in 2003, I am self taught.
My development as an artist, however, did involve a very lengthy apprenticeship. My mother has been a lifelong mixed media artist and I spent most of my childhood in various art galleries and performance spaces in New York City. In college I studied creative writing and the effort to present ideas in unique ways has served me well in my photography. In graduate school for Asian American Studies, I began to question the notion of truth and authorship which clashed deliciously with my, at the time, burgeoning interest in photography. I have also created and edited crossword puzzles for the last twenty years and the fostering of jarring juxtapositions and obscure relationships has impacted my art. In my local life, I design gardens, greatly influencing my conception of framing in three dimensional space.
When I look at my own work, I see - and I hope you see - quiet humor and loud color. I love the balance of large swathes of mundane texture eviscerated by a shock of fluorescence, I love a logjam of shape, and am continually mesmerized by the many hues in a single palette. I hope I don’t mock or exploit individuals, but I do feel as though I present us fairly and as fairly unappealing. I’m interested in people for their own sake, but I’m more interested in the interdependence of people and the ways in which we all juggle our shared space. How do we function, my camera asks. Not as well as my camera, says the photo.
Pricing:
Images are available in editions of ten at either 6x9 for $100 or 12x18 for $200.
Open editions of all photos at 4x6 are available for $25 each.
Contact me for pricing on custom sizes over 12x18.
Contact Me
markfrussell@gmail.com