| At their core, the photographs Craig Doty creates are an exploration of the medium of photography itself. His aims lie in exploiting the traits of photography that are specific to its own being. Employing charged subject matter Doty aims to draw the viewer out of an apathetic viewing of the medium, to show that photography is not a document of fact, but rather a new thing all together. In 2007 Doty’s exhibition, Devastator, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, related the formal and aesthetic construction of the photographs to the subject’s emotional state. Figures in various states of distress are framed in worlds of jarring color combinations, dramatic lighting scenarios, and chaotic interior spaces. |  |
Brian Sowell
At their core, the photographs Craig Doty creates are an exploration of the medium of photography itself. His aims lie in exploiting the traits of photography that are specific to its own being. Employing charged subject matter Doty aims to draw the viewer out of an apathetic viewing of the medium, to show that photography is not a document of fact, but rather a new thing all together.
In 2007 Doty’s exhibition, Devastator, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, related the formal and aesthetic construction of the photographs to the subject’s emotional state. Figures in various states of distress are framed in worlds of jarring color combinations, dramatic lighting scenarios, and chaotic interior spaces. Using formal devices most notably employed by street photographers, such as Lee Friedlander and William Eggleston, the work is as much a conversation about the fragile emotional states of the characters found within the photographs as it is about photography itself. In 2009 Doty’s play between form and content was brought to its zenith in Doty’s collection of photographs entitled Women. Drawing heavily from art history and literature the photographs found their inspiration in sources as varied as A.M. Homes’ pedophilic pen pal novel The End of Alice to the 19th-century photographs of Henry Fox Talbot. Similar to Willem De Kooning’s paintings of the same subject, the photographs that comprise Women attempt to overpower an intensely charged and well-mined subject matter with form. Understanding that the subject matter can never be viewed in a completely apolitical light the photographs of Women aim for discomfort, intentionally provoking the viewer. In some ways, Doty’s next project, Two Nudes, at Important Projects in Oakland, CA, acts as a response to the loaded subject matter found in Women. The project is comprised of two photographs of nude men, captured with an air of clinical detachment. The work plays upon the Arbus-ian idea that photography gives the viewer license to stare, to inspect and scrutinize each man’s nude body. While Devastator and Women explored formal devices specific to the medium, Two Nudes focuses on a different attribute of photography—its illusion of transparency.
Doty’s current work explores seeing in a different way. Using Robert Adam’s idea that beauty is found in form because it soothes our fear that life may be chaos as a starting point, Doty’s newest work explores the relationship between photographic vision and what we find visually beautiful. Investigating beauty through both content and form, the photographs explore ordered compositions as well as traditional notions of beauty, occurring both in nature and how they have been represented historically in art.
