Céline
Jeffrey
Silverthorne is an American photographer, you can see his
retrospective exhibition at the Antwerp Fotomuseum. This exhibition
is literally a rollercoaster of emotions, Silverthorne photographs a
lot of different subjects like sex, death, mental illness and even
vacation trips.
His
earliest work (early 70s) exhibited are portraits, he photographs
travesties and friends, often the people in the pictures are naked
and there is a very sexual atmosphere, this is something that will
always come back in his photographs.
My
favorite series of photos are his “morgue” series, the
photographs are horrible because he takes picture of dead people at
the morgue, but at the same time they are just beautiful. This series
is like strange and dark, but beautifully haunting and poetic. My
favorite portrait is one of a sleeping woman, she looks so peaceful
and it’s an amazing photograph.
I
love how Silverthorne will create such intimacy in his photographs.
Another thing that I like is how his portraits can be shocking in a
way but Silverthorne doesn’t shock on purpose like Araki would do
with his pornographic photographs. He has two other series that are
very close to the morgue series. One of them is a series where he
photographs missing persons potters on the streets. The other series
he took at a psychiatric hospital next to the morgue, those
photographs are very different from the others he took because he was
not allowed to photograph the faces of the patients. They are
portraits without being portraits, if that makes any sense.
Sadly
enough after this series he had one other that I loved “Tex-Mex”
but after this one he lost me a little bit. His new photographs are
very theatrical, his older portraits were staged too but I feel like
he crossed something in his latest photographs. They do not feel
intimate anymore. He takes a lot of self-portraits with very young
ladies, he explains this is because he wants to emphasize the fact of
him getting older. I’m not convinced he did a good job with that…
Be
sure to go check out the exhibition, it’s running for two more
weeks in Antwerp! Silverthorne is an amazing photographer, you won’t
regret it !
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