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Indepth Arts News:
"Doug Dubois: Photographs"
2001-03-04 until 2001-04-29
Everson Musuem of Art
Syracuse, NY,
USA
The majority of photographs in this exhibition comes from a recent body of work
that presents a taxonomy of commuters from disparate parts of the world. Among the
groups are motorinos, taken in Florence, Italy; motorsi (bikers), taken in Bangkok,
Thailand; and subway commuters or chikatetsu, taken in Tokyo, Japan. The commuter
portraits vary in character from voyeuristic to confrontational: the subjects in the
images from Florence and Tokyo were not aware they were being photographed; the
bikers in Bangkok were shot head-on, paparazzo-style, as they waited at red lights on
busy city streets. Displayed as serial installations, each set of images allows the
viewer and photographic subject to engage in a complex series of encounters.
Depending on the city, the viewer alternates from being a casual observer to the
photographer's analogue, from voyeur to participant. A fourth group of images,
entitled Winners, focuses on prize-winning visitors to the midway amusements at
Syracuse's New York State Fair. Arranged as a morning-to-nighttime series, the
twelve individual compositions present head-to-toe portraits of the winners, alone or
in groups of two, holding on to their stuffed-toy prizes. As willing and posed subjects
for DuBois's camera, Winners presents a classic typological study in the manner of
August Sander's Man of the Twentieth Century, a photographic series that DuBois
warmly acknowledges. Like Sander's subjects, Winners can be read for specific
information about these people at this fair. But all of DuBois's work can also be
viewed as an investigation of a larger ethos involving the global economy, class
structure, and national and personal identity.
Over the past fifteen years, Doug
DuBois has shown his work across the United States. He has had solo exhibitions at
New Langston Arts, San Francisco, CA; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence,
RI; Bridge Center for Contemporary Art, El Paso, TX; among others. Public
collections containing his work include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. DuBois has received prestigious art awards such as the Fine Arts Grant from
SITE, Santa Fe, the Eliot Porter Fellowship from the New Mexico Council on
Photography, and Light Work Grant in Photography.
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