Random Excellence: Michael Paul Smith

February 5 2010, 9:09am

It might not be immediately obvious to you why this photograph by Michael Paul Smith qualifies as interesting...

...Clearer now?

See more of Michael Paul Smith's model world.

Mike(Thanks to Stuart Klipper, via Ctein)

Send this post to a friendNote: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...

Featured Comment by Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Model photography is a big thing in the artworld these days.

"I'm not sure when or where it started, but one very typical example is the success of Sarah Anne Johnson.

"She's Canadian, trained at Yale, and works with handmade figurines. She uses the figurines as companion pictures to more reportage-style ones. My reading of it is that she's toeing the line between representation and reconstitution, a little bit like Errol Morris in the Thin Blue Line.

"There's something hot about the notion/image of miniature itself: take for example Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri.

"He's doing the exact opposite of what Michael Paul Smith is doing: instead of making models look like reality, he's making reality look like a model (using a tilt/shift lens and an aerial perspective, something that has now become an annoying shtick).

"Finally, there's that German (?) photographer whose name I can't find, who recreates entire hyperrealistic scenes (an office, kitchen sink, a garden wall covered with vine) using nothing but paper. He would fit right in with Smith's approach, except that instead of using the most appropriate materials possible, he relies on the very subtle difference in rendering of texture that paper creates. Compared to how the real things look like, paper is just a little too 'perfect.' He's tapping into our memory of perception, and toying with it. Smith does the opposite: he does everything he can to fulfill our perceptual expectations of what a gas bar or a street corner looks like.

"At any rate, probably because of the 'fictional turn' that art photography took in the late '70s/early '80s with people like Cindy Sherman or Jeff Wall, we're surrounded with a lot of ambitious fictional/hyperrealistic metteurs en scène like the above people who blend fiction, fakery, realism, and representation."