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Painted Love
by Samantha West
In the 1930s, the brilliant art and literature critic Walter Benjamin feared that photography was going to put an end to painting, that the literality of photographic images would ruin the “aura” of painted work. What he didn’t foresee is how profitable a reciprocal influence the two media could have on one another.
It’s easy to see when a painting mimics photographic elements; with photography, it’s more subtle. But in a photographer like Samantha West’s www.samanthawest.net
work, the composition of color and elements take such center stage, you can imagine Manet wanting to adapt each of her images in oil.
West, the subject of the last two shots in the gallery, studied the history of painting, and especially likes the Pre-Raphaelites. Her subjects are typically women she knows, and she shoots them either in their apartments or “in her bed.” She doesn’t overly direct them during the shoots — as she says, no “lower your wrist half an inch” – but tends to have a composition in her mind that suits each subject.
She laughs happily when I tell her that despite the eroticism of a lot of her shots, sometimes it seems like there isn't a body there, that the subject simply blends into the tableau. She says that taking pictures for her has always been “a visual diary,” but there’s no doubt it’s also been a sketchbook, and the final results like a studio full of canvases.
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