Zeke Berman Photography

Gate Taught Version 1991. Large format silver gelatin photo. signed and dated. Zeke Berman’s still lifes are fabrications derived from the material of ordinary and intimate experience, reconstituted to satisfy the demands of improvised play, monocular vision, and the special characteristics of photographic description. They are concerned with the pictorial aspect of sculpture and the provisional nature of realistic indication. In the central tradition of still-life art, they aim to establish an unsuspected order in the congregation of unremarkable things. Since the late 1970's Zeke Berman has been making singular, studio-based photographs. These works reflect his long standing interest in visual cognition, optics and the intersection between sculpture, photography and drawing. The formal range of his work and his sculptural use of materials is varied, original and idiosyncratic. Berman’s work has been collected and exhibited in museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan, Whitney, Art Institute of Chicago and LA County Museum. His work was featured in the first New Photography Exhibition, 1984, at MoMA. Awards include Guggenheim, NEA and NYFA Arts Fellowships. Berman lives and works in New York City. from MOMA A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio examines the ways in which photographers and other artists using photography have worked and experimented within their studios, from photography’s inception to the present. Featuring both new acquisitions and works from the Museum’s collection that have not been on view in recent years, A World of Its Own brings together photographs, films, and videos by artists such as Berenice Abbott, Uta Barth, Zeke Berman, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Geta Brătescu, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Paul Outerbridge, Irving Penn, Adrian Piper, Edward Steichen, William Wegman, and Edward Weston. Depending on the period, the cultural or political context, and the commercial, artistic, or scientific motivations of the artist, the studio might be a haven, a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. For more than a century, photographers have dealt with the spaces of their studios in strikingly diverse and inventive ways: from using composed theatrical tableaux (in photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron or Cindy Sherman) to putting their subjects against neutral backdrops (Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe); from the construction of architectural sets within the studio (Francis Bruguière, Thomas Demand) to chemical procedures conducted within the darkroom (Walead Beshty, Christian Marclay); and from precise recordings of motion (Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton) to playful, amateurish experimentation (Roman Signer...