Amy Arbus

The Inconvenience of Being Born

Larry Fink

An "after image" is an impression of a vivid image retained by the eye after the stimulus has ceased. For her fifth book of portraits, Amy Arbus has borrowed ideas from iconic modernist paintings by artists including Picasso, Cezanne, Munch, Schiele, and Modigliani, and transferred their visceral energy and psychological intensity to live staged scenes to be photographed. In order to replicate the powerful effects of the original paintings, she painted costumes, props, and the models themselves. What has materialised is a series of hybrid images that challenges the thin line between painting and art photography. Chiaroscuro lighting and lush colours produce dark trompe l'oeil portraits in which the live models appear to be trying to escape the confines of the two-dimensional world that holds them captive.

After Images

What happens when a performing actor leaves behind his lines, staging, sets, and lighting, and steps beyond the fourth wall? For three years, Amy Arbus has been exploring this question in a series of dramatic portraits of celebrated actors, both on and off Broadway. Fully costumed but stripped of their context, Arbus's actors remain in character as they step outside the fiction of theater into the reality of the world beyond. Staged in anonymous public spaces--in theater lobbies, on city streets, in parks, and in stage door alleys--Arbus's images achieve an unexpected blend of spectacle and high art; formality and sontaneity; vulnerability and pretense. Collected in The Fourth Wall are some of the modern stage's most gifted actors, including Alan Cumming in Cabaret, John Malkovitch in Lost Land, Liev Schreiber in Talk Radio, Ed Harris in Wrecks, Cherry Jones in Doubt, Christine Ebersol in Grey Gardens, and Ethan Hawke and Martha Plimpton in The Coast of Utopia. Actors are included from such successful and ambitioud productions as Wicked, The Light in the Piazza, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and The Color Purple, to name but a few. Portraits are accompanied by synopses of the plays as well as quotes from a number of the actors portrayed. In 2006's critically acclaimed book On the Street, Arbus focused her lens on those who dressed to express themselves--now she turns her attention to those who dress to become someone else. The result is a collection of potent photographs that pay remarkable tribute to contemporary theater and the performers who bring fantasy to life.

Amy Arbus

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