Steven Poster: STILL
January 8 – February 19, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 8, 6-9pm
Steven Poster is perhaps best known for his long professional history as a leading cinematographer for the Hollywood studios. Early in his career he worked on major motion pictures such as Blade Runner and Close Encounters. His work as a Director of Photography includes Someone To Watch Over Me and Donnie Darko and his most recent work The Box and Spread. He is the President of the International Cinematographer Guild and is active guiding emerging film makers through the Nicholl Fellowship of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences although it is Poster’s still photography that he has been faithful to for over forty years, which led him to the world of movies at an early age.
STILL, an exhibition in conjunction with the SMOG DANCE Society Film Festival, is a collection of documentary moments which speak to a number of subjects--from a quiet interior scene to a landscape to a figure within a complex composition. They are moments between reality and a dream. As art critic/historian Peter Frank writes, “Poster admits to investing his work with the quality of fiction, but the aura of that quality is that of the spectacle, the enveloping of the witness in luminosity and bustle, urgency and confusion, interludes of calm briefly allowing life’s cacophonic vaudeville to catch its breath. Again, Poster’s approach captures that dream quality that puts you in the middle…and he does so without resort to camera shenanigans, surrealist trickery, or the manipulation of anything more than the silver on the photo paper – and the willingness of the human mind to be taken along for a wild ride.”
“But for all his forward thinking, and deft employment of digital tools in his own work, Poster remains faithful in his still photography to the absence of color. For him, photographs are documents not of things seen, but things remembered; as we remember things first and foremost graphically, not coloristically, the aura of the recollection and even of the dream clings to Poster’s still images. Perhaps that is why these haunting pictures convey both a sense of motion and the sense of time standing still.”
Steven Poster is also one of the jurors for the 13th Annual Smog Dance Film Society’s short video and film festival which will take place at the Historic Fox Theater Sunday, February 13, 2011. Poster will speak and present the festival award winners
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 8, 6-9pm
Steven Poster is perhaps best known for his long professional history as a leading cinematographer for the Hollywood studios. Early in his career he worked on major motion pictures such as Blade Runner and Close Encounters. His work as a Director of Photography includes Someone To Watch Over Me and Donnie Darko and his most recent work The Box and Spread. He is the President of the International Cinematographer Guild and is active guiding emerging film makers through the Nicholl Fellowship of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences although it is Poster’s still photography that he has been faithful to for over forty years, which led him to the world of movies at an early age.
STILL, an exhibition in conjunction with the SMOG DANCE Society Film Festival, is a collection of documentary moments which speak to a number of subjects--from a quiet interior scene to a landscape to a figure within a complex composition. They are moments between reality and a dream. As art critic/historian Peter Frank writes, “Poster admits to investing his work with the quality of fiction, but the aura of that quality is that of the spectacle, the enveloping of the witness in luminosity and bustle, urgency and confusion, interludes of calm briefly allowing life’s cacophonic vaudeville to catch its breath. Again, Poster’s approach captures that dream quality that puts you in the middle…and he does so without resort to camera shenanigans, surrealist trickery, or the manipulation of anything more than the silver on the photo paper – and the willingness of the human mind to be taken along for a wild ride.”
“But for all his forward thinking, and deft employment of digital tools in his own work, Poster remains faithful in his still photography to the absence of color. For him, photographs are documents not of things seen, but things remembered; as we remember things first and foremost graphically, not coloristically, the aura of the recollection and even of the dream clings to Poster’s still images. Perhaps that is why these haunting pictures convey both a sense of motion and the sense of time standing still.”
Steven Poster is also one of the jurors for the 13th Annual Smog Dance Film Society’s short video and film festival which will take place at the Historic Fox Theater Sunday, February 13, 2011. Poster will speak and present the festival award winners
