Venice Salvage

As the photographic duo E2, New Orleans natives Elizabeth Kleinveld and Epaul Julien seek to remake images from art history to reflect their own experience of the contemporary world. Tackling icons from the great masters like Botticelli, Manet, Rembrandt, and Van Eyck, they recast instantly familiar images in a distinctly modern manner, breaking them free from centuries of historical context and placing them firmly in the present.

Kleinveld and Julien were introduced when each showed photographs in the traveling exhibition, “Before (During) After: Louisiana Photographers Respond to Hurricane Katrina,” for the storm’s five-year anniversary in 2010. They quickly realized a shared interest in matters of social justice and racial and socioeconomic inequality, which this natural and man-made disaster had brought into focus. Soon after, they began working together on In Empathy We Trust, an evolving photographic project seeking to examine contemporary social issues through the lens of art history.

The journey from the original germination of an idea to a completed E2 photograph is long and complex, often taking six months to a year. Both pre-production and the shoots themselves take place on two continents, as Julien lives in New Orleans while Kleinveld resides in Amsterdam. As such, the planning and execution of their shoots involve months of collaboration, with countless emails and phone calls exchanged. Kleinveld and Julien begin their process with online research and by visiting museums throughout the United States and Europe, searching for compelling images that resonate with our contemporary experience. They then seek to change the context of these images, replacing the original figures with contemporary stand-ins from all races and backgrounds, to more accurately reflect the diversity of the world around them.

Once an image is selected to be “remade with a twist,” they begin to find sitters (preferring artists, actors, and friends rather than models) representing a wide range of marginalized groups — African-American, Asian-American, LGBT — who have not seen themselves equally represented in media and art. After sitters have been selected, E2 begins the work of sourcing costumes. Their European shoots have involved costumes from the Dutch National Theatre in Amsterdam, Dutch costume maker Bert Nuhaan and Studio Pietro Longhi in Venice, while their hometown shoots in New Orleans are a bit less glamorous, seeing them employ sources varying from thrift stores to friends’ closets.

The photographs themselves are the product of careful planning and production rather than chance — more Gregory Crewdson than Diane Arbus. Each shoot is a carefully orchestrated production, featuring up to a dozen sitters, as well as lighting, costume, staging and more. Kleinveld and Julien’s work as E2 sees them each taking on a myriad of roles, from auteur to producer to subject. The finished product is a result of intense collaboration and teamwork, with both Julien and Kleinveld taking turns behind the camera. After the shoots are completed, the work of post-production begins, where extensive digital collaging of subjects and background is often required. They often employ artists such as Italian painter Marco Ventura to hand-paint the backgrounds of their images, further blurring the lines between both photography and painting, and present and past.

In a world that is becoming increasingly stratified along religious, cultural, economic, and ethnic lines, E2’s photographs apply a new interpretation of icons from the past, making them more inclusive for the multicultural world we live in. E2 does not seek to make demands, but to pose questions: why shouldn’t Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring be Asian? Why can’t the iconic image Washington Crossing the Delaware be adapted to show the first President as an African-American woman? For it is in these answers that we find the lingering doubts and biases that we often do not dare to acknowledge.

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(Biography provided by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery)

Used to refer to a time rather than an aesthetic, Contemporary art generally describes pieces created after 1970 or being made by living artists anywhere in the world. This immediacy means it encompasses art responding to the present moment through diverse subjects, media and themes. Contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, video and more frequently includes work that is attempting to reshape current ideas about what art can be, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of candy to memorialize a lover he lost to AIDS-related complications to Jenny Holzer’s ongoing “Truisms,” a Conceptual series that sees provocative messages printed on billboards, T-shirts, benches and other public places that exist outside of formal exhibitions and the conventional “white cube” of galleries.

Contemporary art has been pushing the boundaries of creative expression for years. Its disruption of the traditional concepts of art are often aiming to engage viewers in complex questions about identity, society and culture. In the latter part of the 20th century, contemporary movements included Land art, in which artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer create large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations and other works in soil and bodies of water; Sound art, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz centering art on sonic experiences; and New Media art, in which mass media and digital culture inform the work of artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafaël Rozendaal.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen the growth of Contemporary African art, the revival of figurative painting, the emergence of street art and the rise of NFTs, unique digital artworks that are powered by blockchain technology.

Major Contemporary artists practicing now include Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Kara Walker.

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Find a broad range of photography on 1stDibs today.

The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries. Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was given a Kodak camera as a child. Later, she shot on Polaroid film before buying her first 35mm camera in her teens. Barron's stunning portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and other artists chronicle a crucial chapter of New York’s cultural history.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.