Douglas Prince - the artist I wish I had heard speak.

I was misinformed about this lecture. I had planned on attending but someone who I expected would know well the facts misinformed me and told me there was no lecture this day. His work is pretty fascinating to me. His work is fairly unique and surreal, layered images that create juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated things. There is however, cohesion, of method and presentation, through the sheer number of pieces produced he creates a rhythm. Some of his earlier work he calls Photo Sculpture, I believe these are all done through analog processes.

This image jumps out to me, "View from the Tower of Piza," an off kilter shot of classical architecture, beautifully rendered in bleachy tones, overlaid with the tools of the classical architect. Why is it off kilter? Because the Tower of Piza is leaning. The arrow shaped weight, known as a "plumb-bob" is a simple way of finding alignment with gravity. In this image the plumb-bob is plumb, or directly vertical.

A second image from the same series I can find less logic in, "Octopus Chamber" features an octopus in a chamber. I can't riddle this one out but I like octopus, and I find it interesting and surreal, so I can sort of accept it.

Another series in his archive folder, Multi Negative Silver Prints, continue to fall all over the spectrum as to surreality and logic. They are generally masterfully done, making it difficult to determine where one negative was used in place of another. I post this image above, Brian with Whale, because I can derive narrative from it and because It shows strong compositional logic. It makes one wonder what Prince would be showing us if he produced straight photographs. 

This next image is "Brian, Snake and Mountains," again Prince shows strong compositional thinking coupled with narrative imagery. 

And one more from the series, "Weather Station," I post because I really, really like the cloud he found.

His newer work is strange and stranger. Intense digital manipulation creating interesting images but nothing that I can say I'm especially thankful to have viewed, with the exception of the Shore Lines series. I have seen images similar to this, single lines of pixels drawn across a screen, but he has taken it farther, or less far rather, employing this pixel-dragging method to only part of an image. I want to call it brilliant, I don't know where he got the inspiration, but I like where it is going. Perhaps not every image is entirely successful, but some of them are quite satisfying. Prince is someone I will be looking to for inspiration.