The Painted Photograph


  • Photographer
    Dean West
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    Dean West Inc
  • Date of Photograph
    2015-2016

Real in depiction and imaginary in association, “The Painted Photograph” contains a set of rigorously composed, scenic character portrayals that merge the pictorial traditions of cinema and documentary photography. The works owe a great deal to the staged imagery of Philip- Lorca di Corcia and Jeff Wall, embedded with a system of signs, visual cues and biases that can assist but not explicitly define what exactly is happening. In the exhibited photographs, West reconstructs personal experiences and encounters in anongoing investigation of his surrounding environment. Through the sampling and deconstruction of these moments, the surreal images look at how memory “is not a video recorder [but that] it’s a constructive activity that is in many ways accurate but prone to interesting errors and distortions”. 1 Tie this in with photography’s ability to both record and deceive, West’s allegorical simulations force the viewer to consider the relationship between narrative meaning and their own subjectivities.

You can create multiple entries, and pay for them at the same time.
Just go to your History, and select multiple entries that you would like to pay for.