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Sean Marc Lee lives and works in Los Angeles.
Sean Marc Lee, Resting Love Feets. Courtesy of the Artist.
When we were younger, my mother wasn’t home much of the time. She was always traveling on business so we found ourselves being raised primarily by my taxi-driving father. My younger brother, Stephan and sister, Suzette were a team along with my father. On weekends he would take us around San Francisco to museums, parks, arcades and the beaches. Sometimes we would build and launch model rockets, or fly kites at the top of the hill near our house. Perhaps the one thing we did often that marked my time growing up was watching films.
Heading into the old musky theaters of San Francisco’s Chinatown, my father often took us to see R-rated movies at a young age believing that violence in movies was a reflection of what was happening in the real world. We saw them all: action, horror, martial arts, science fiction and the occasional Disney film. It wasn’t until college when I took up cinema studies that I realized a world of cinema outside the taste of what my father exposed me to.
I suppose it’s safe to say, that I owe my love of film largely to my father. This is a reflection of my work not just in what you see here, but outside of the photos shown here. There are many shades of tastes ranging from the obvious to the subtle. Everything has a context with everything being influenced by something else. If I were to describe what I do in a phrase, it would be “cinematically correct.” At the core of it all, I am just trying to tell a story or make a film with each image.
I’ve a hard time talking about my work. It makes me uncomfortable and I can never find the right words to express what it is I do. Below is what someone wrote about me on a recent blog that I believe more or less is a good description:
“What I love most is how each of your photographs hinges upon, and/or reveals, the power of gesture. In several photographs this attention to gesture, to movement and placement and how the two combined express feeling, is so subtle, like the placement of a napkin having been discarded just after finishing a meal; one need not even look for it to feel its presence or effect. Your work affects the viewer without being obvious or overbearing; it’s how, in real life, one stumbles upon a delicious moment they wish to savor forever. That’s beauty. That’s perfection.”
