a new show of radical sex portraits by Mark I Chester
My work is stimulated by and built upon the work of artists as diverse as George Catlin, who painted Indian tribes and documented their rituals in the US in the mid 1800s, August Sander who documented the German people in very straight forward black and white photos, Dorothea Lange and her work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the people of Appalachia and the haunting, yet sometimes stagy images by Diane Arbus. Cultures that are not documented disappear. So while sexual desire is a subtext in all of these images, the images themselves have their basis both in social documentary work and fine art portraiture.
