Tag: patricio suarez

Patricio Suarez – Untitled (2013)

I’ve posted about Suarez before and I remain just as if not maybe a bit more enamored with his work now.

Spending more time with the work I’ve discovered a conceptual reflexiveness between his tendency to focus on picturesque interiors and a concern for a psychological interiority.

In some photographs the subject acknowledges the camera but it’s rare to feel that the gaze is directed at any audience. Instead, it feels more like the audience is intended to serve as a mirror.

I also can’t help but note how this image feels different than the rest of Suarez’s work. Whereas the rest of the work features mostly woman, in darkened, oneric locations, all of it feels very different than the way so many of the image makers who are producing quasi-narrative work that is a hybrid of portraiture and documentary, there tends to be a feeling of loneliness to it.

I don’t feel that with the rest of the work but I do very strongly with this image. A tenacious melancholia. The image offers no clue as to what might be the cause of that feeling. But it does strike me not that the feeling is incidental so much as a closely held secret that wants to be told but is not sure the telling won’t just bring about more harm.

Truly lovely.

Patricio Suarez – Desiree Film Scans (2015)

The list of photographers whose work I’ll unreservedly endorse is short. Today, it got one photographer longer: Patricio Suarez.

I’m not even sure where to start. I mean, the quality of the work speaks for itself.

My customary fetish for extreme quality takes a back seat here next to how strongly these images resonate with me. It’s totally knee jerk, but the compositional logic is more than a little reminiscent of Mark Romanek–and that’s not a reference I toss around lightly.

As someone who came to photography via cinematography, there’s a tendency in my experience for photographers to treat locations as more of aesthetic enhancement or simple back drop than a facet in a holistic image.

Thus, what really blows me right the fuck a-fucking-way is the way Suarez creates portraits anchored in the relationship between person and personal occupancy of space–location informs character, character informs location.

(It’s not at all surprising that Suarez’s day job is a commercial director of photography.)

His images of Nettie Harris are jaw dropping in their Nettie-ness. Short of ericashires, no one shoots Johanna Stickland in so unmediated and present-in-the-moment a manner. And Kelsey Dylan… bring my smelling salts because I’m feeling faint…

All-around fucking fantastic.

Source: psuarez