*BLOW UP*

In 1999 I moved to NY for school and got a part time gig assisting the photographer, Lyle Ashton Harris. I was 18, really naïve, not familiar with his work and had no idea of what I was getting into. However, I learned a lot from Lyle and gained experience early on. Let’s just say that it was a valuable, yet harsh welcome to the city. I haven’t seen him in about 7 years, had no idea what he was up to and just came across his new retrospective monograph titled ’Blow Up’ in a book store earlier this evening.

-The Washington Post's Jessica Dawson recently wrote of New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris, "Two decades into his career, Harris still concerns himself with the game of appearances and perception: how we present ourselves in public, how our bodies--and the meanings they carry--are received by others, how gender and race are constructed... He also reveals a poetic sensibility: a desire, shared by writers and poets, to make visible our complicated inner worlds. He acknowledges the ambivalences we carry. Blow Up, Harris' first retrospective monograph, published on the occasion of his 2008 traveling exhibition, which originated at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, features full-color reproductions from throughout his career.”

-From the Scottsdale Museum: Harris approaches photography as a social performance. He "blows up" preconceptions of portraiture, mass-media imagery and street photography and zeroes in on the viewers’ role as a reader of images—images that are also evidence of one’s sense of self, gender and race. This exhibition is structured as a vast collage of imagery that weaves back and forth over time and reveals the artist’s dynamic, recombinant creative process.

The reviews and museum texts do not acknowledge the title ‘Blow Up’ as being a reference to or having any contextual relation to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film . However, I think it somehow, indirectly must. Just because I know that ‘Blow Up (the movie)’ happens to be one of his favorites… He not only introduced me to it …but required that I rent and watch it before I began working for him.