Jenna Annunziato – Portraits

I had the pleasure of working with the talented artists Jenna Annunziato [ https://www.jennaannunziato.com ] who became the first person to sit for a series of portraits using my Painting with a Camera technique. The results are fascinating and stunning. Below is a small selection from the series. Jenna Annunziato: Portraits asks questions. What am I looking at? Is this a photograph, a painting, a painting of a photograph or a photograph of a painting, or something entirely different? As for portraits, there isn’t a single image that resembles classic portraiture, and there are few images where a defined person can be identified. Can these images be called portraits? And how exactly does one paint with a camera? Through what appears like an alchemical process of image extraction – rather than image making – the series challenges the conventions of art historical categories. Even while questioning the nature of painting and photography, the influence of both mediums and their histories is apparent. The impact might be from the Surrealists, who explored dreamlike and phantasmagoric states in photography and painting, the psychedelic art of the 1960s, which found its vision through consciousness-expanding experiments, and even the nightmarish images of Francis Bacon, or the stream of consciousness and mixed styles of George Condo, to name a few. Each person and movement conjured a dream or altered state while exploring the possibilities of their mediums.

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