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Review

Photographer David Sprigle asks his subjects (some from his bohemian circle of friends) to take off their clothes. To jump up and down, to rub their torsos. This spontaneous and colorful activity is captured via blurry timeslices from his simple, plastic Polaroid camera. The best of these instant moments appear in the new, full-color book SNAP published by FotoFactory Press. Best known for his photorealistic black and white portraits and nudes of ordinary people, Sprigle defined a movement of homo-erotic photographers which emerged in the early 1990s not from the world of fashion or commercial photography, but rather from the trenches of a changing--often personal--reality. Sprigle has long sought to document and incite shifts in America’s relationship with eroticism by casually capturing unguarded naked moments. The Polaroid series presented in SNAP echoes his sociological motive and an emphasis on gesture and structural precision, through the abstract exposure of a visual choreography. In SNAP, Sprigle fundamentally changes the way we understand the beauty of the accidental moment. These images of rough elegance are reminiscent of the attenuated figures, movement and tension of Baroque Paintings. Yet, the characteristics are random--products of ostensible lighting conditions. The photos, Sprigle's newest series, are a visual essay about our instant culture. About a new aesthetic that arises from the intersection of cheap consumer technology and art. He presents a sanctioned voyeurism: reality tightly cropped, frontally composed and blurred by time to become unexpectedly beautiful. His color pallet, seemingly based in oil paint rather then photographic grain, is drawn from the Impressionistic Masters. Sprigle's work examines the way light rearranges an almost-classical memory of the human form. Longtime friend and fellow photographer Arthur Tress introduces this 96-page clothbound volume which also includes a provocative essay on Sprigle’s cultural significance by filmmaker Stephen Patrick Foery. FotoFactory Press has joined forces with the David Aden Gallery in Venice Beach to offer reproductions of the Sprigle Polaroids in this book. The David Aden Gallery will exhibit SNAP: David Sprigle’s Polaroid Series in February, 2000.