Samaras : the photographs of Lucas Samaras / Essay by Ben Lifson

Photographer, painter, sculptor, Lucas Samaras is one of the most influential and provocative artists of our time. Once again available to readers, this long out-of-print volume presents a thorough compilation of Samara's photographic work, beginning with his earliest "Auto-Polaroids" This exhaustive body of work paved the way for a generation of contemporary photo-artists, expanding the expressive possibilities of the medium. Using Polaroid materials, large - sometimes life-sized--formats, manipulated imagery, and composites, Samaras helped forge a vocabulary employed by artists and photographers throughout the eighties. In his most profound achievement, he adopted one of photography's basic genres - portraiture - and used it as a basis for an inquiry into the self, which remains unmatched in its intensity and boundless in its ramifications.

English