STUD DUST/ PHOTOS
An ongoing series of photos begun in 1995, STUD DUST (also known as STUDIO MEN) depicts models in the studio interacting with props and signs, the images touching on ideas of self-image in an age of media saturation, as well as on age, ephemerality, territory and perception. While I generate text for the signs, I also ask the models to suggest words and phrases significant to themselves. Similarly, they sometimes provide their own props in an attempt to address portraiture on a different level. As I have entered some of the images over the years, the portfolio has also become a self-portrait vis a vis the fleeting surface idealization of these men. My goal, however, has been to reach beyond whatever stereotypes we might be tempted to assign men so emblematic of today's obsession with youth and beauty (do we think of aloofness, privilege, a certain power structure?) I get to engage these "usual suspects" on a variety of levels, taking them off certain pedestals of perfection and, through portraiture and metaphor, put them back transformed. Their collaboration makes them complicit thus in our viewing of them, but their subsequent vulnerability empowers us at the same time. Can their ultimate defense be their humanity?
