David Benjamin Sherry is another artist the class suggested for me to research. I must admit, when I first started scanning the links on Google, I was a little disappointed. This guy did an interview with Urban Outfitters? Ew. But I won’t blame Sherry (or the class). However, on a slight tangent, the article spent two-thirds of the interview talking about how he’s gay and how he did drugs when he was twelve. One-third talked about how fashion photography can be art once you do more than photograph a model in front of a backdrop. Anyways, back to Sherry, because he is an artist with merits, and not just an Urban Outfitters flavor-of-the-week.
Sherry is from Woodstock, NY, and as his hippy background would suggest, his photographs are heavily saturated in colors and have a certain tie-dye affect. The vibrant colors in Sherry’s work could also reflect an influence from David LaChappelle, as Sherry was his intern for one summer. Sherry’s education is extremely impressive. He went to RISD for his undergraduate training, and studied at Yale for graduate school, where his mentor was Philip Lorca-Dicorcia. David Benjamin Sherry does a little bit of everything with his photographs. Some are fashion-based editorials. Other pieces of his work are experimental landscape photographs. He even does the self-portrait now and then. The photographs that totally stun me are the portraits that manipulate the space and the subject to be one hue. There is a green man, in a green meadow, surrounded by a green forest. There is also a photo of a blue ban, with a blue ball in his mouth, in a blue room. To me, this is eye candy. I see passion and love for what he’s doing, but I don’t necessarily see a concept. However, that’s completely fine. I’m attracted firstly to aesthetics and that’s what stands out in Sherry’s work. The class mentioned that I would like these photographs for his use of color and how he stays away from digital manipulation. I found out from my research that that isn’t necessarily the case, but Sherry does depend a lot on manipulated all that he can during production. Most of his photographs have a nostalgic quality, as if they came right out of my mom's photo album from her flower child days. It's ironic how he and others try to achieve this look through digital means. (Another tangent: proof that pixels can't match the archival quality of analog. Ha!)
Do I see my own work like the work of David Benjamin Sherry’s? No. Definitely not. But, I do appreciate it. To me, I hope that my work falls somewhere in between that of Sherry’s and that of Jeff Wall’s. I love the outlandishly surrealistic qualities of Sherry’s photographs—it’s like being on an acid trip. Personally, I’ve never been on acid, but I guess I can trust Sherry, because according to that Urban Outfitters article he has definitely tried the stuff.
Rain and I at Teepee
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