If you’re new to Lux Archive you’re not alone. We just launched four days ago…everyone is new here!
Thank you to those who have left us kind comments, emails, and tweets over the past few days. Please keep sending us your feedback, we love hearing from you. And speaking of hearing from you: this blog will regularly feature exclusive content about contemporary fine art photography. So if there’s a topic, trend, or artist you want discussed here then tell us!
Share your thoughts on our Facebook page and on Twitter.
Untitled Explosion #LE-CN04-18, 2010 © Geoffrey H. Short
Now, onto the introduction of the first artist we’re featuring this week: Geoffrey H. Short.
Geoffrey H. Short has become widely known for doing something that would get many grown men to tremble with delight: blowing stuff up. He hires special effects technicians to create explosions so exotic they would make Bruce Willis jealous.
But it’s not all fun and games. Like many great artists Geoffrey uses spectacle to grab his audiences’ attention. The meaning of his work is layered and complex. Geoffrey writes:
“The series is an exploration of risk, terror, beauty and the sublime through the medium of controlled explosions. The inherent mystery and ultimate inevitability of death makes it a staple subject of contemplation in philosophy and in art. Risking death means both terror and excitement, and the eighteenth century philosophers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant suggested that whatever is terrifying is also sublime.
The photographs offer both illusion and allusion, and while they document actual, staged explosion events, they allude to every explosion from the original big bang of creation to the anxiously anticipated big bang of a terrorist bomb or nuclear disaster. The near absence of a recognizable physical context emphasizes this referential quality, allowing the viewer to imagine their own context, to supply their own narrative around these isolated climactic moments.”
Geoffrey has had dozens of gallery shows around the world and is in the permanent collections of fine institutions including the Aperture Foundation and the Musée de l’Elysée. In 2010 was Geoffrey was chosen to be featured in reGeneration² – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, a widely publicized book and touring exhibition featuring what many industry heavyweights forecast to be the photographers that will shape the next generation of image-making.
Like Geoffrey’s work? You can own it. This image is available as a limited edition, artist signed print exclusively through Lux Archive. Visit our shop for more info.
