Location: United States
Stephen Sheffield
www.stephensheffield.com
617-875-3009
Stephen Sheffield, a native of the Boston area, is an alumnus of Cornell Univeristy in Ithaca NY, where he obtained a BFA in painting and mixed media. He went on to receive his MFA in photography and mixed media from the California College of the Arts in Oakland CA, studying directly under and was assistant to Larry Sultan as well as studying under Jean Finley, Jim Goldberg and others.
Sheffield’s large format black and white photographs are influenced by film noir, crime novels and the projected memories of past eras, Sheffield constructs iconic moments of mystery, ambiguity and male insecurity. Often the photographs depict Sheffield’s displaced figure dressed in a suit standing, crouching, turning, walking and leaning. The figure will sometimes be blurred from movement, heightening the sense of surrounding stillness.
As a fine art photographer and mixed media artist, Stephen Sheffield has exhibited nationally for 30 years. He also has many permanent large-scale private and corporate art commissions in Boston, Connecticut, Philadelphia, New York and Pittsburgh and more. He is adjunct faculty at the New Hampshire Institute of Art MFA Program, and he ran the advanced fine art black and white department at the New England School of Photography in Boston for 12 years.
Influenced by the modern masters of photography and surrealism, specifically, Carrie Mae Weams, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals and Rene Magritte, Stephen Sheffield creates images that are often formal and heroic and dreamlike at the same time. Each image could be considered a performance and the dark suited “everyman” is the muse with Sheffield inhabiting the suit or a diminutive stand-in. Using large format black and white film and an antique press camera, the mood of his photos is enhanced by the purposeful and expressive imperfections of age and medium.
Sheffield, is a storyteller and performer depicting the ordinary and unusual through the filter of his occasionally dark sense of humor. The subject is modern man, men, and masculinity with a focus on fears, failures, ego, irony and manufactured heroics. He often supports the cinematic mood by use of development techniques, non-traditional photographic processes, and outdated Polaroid positive/negative film.
For my series titled Scalpel, Paper & Glue, I culled pieces from a much larger body of work I began making on January 1, 2017, that includes over 800 finished pieces. The work selected was made since January 2019. I chose to edit from my most recent work because I am interested in its sense of immediacy, and its relevance to the current news cycle.
I work intuitively before dawn in the solitude of my studio while listening to news radio, drawing from the topics from each specific day. Every piece is begun and finished, dated and signed on that one day, often before I see my children off to school.
I draw my material from a purposefully specific decade of LIFE Magazine and limit myself to a 14x11” format. The decade just before my own birth, the 1950s, and this era’s LIFE Magazines represent, to me, what has been perceived to be an ideal time. In this work I explore the ideal façade presented in the advertisements vs the unease I read in the articles. I attempt to subvert that ideal and use the past unease, while at the same time drawing a parallel to our own unease in the late 2010s. Within this process I cannot help but instill my own humor and anxiety of modern manhood and parenthood with image juxtaposition and the inexact process of cutting with a scalpel, and fixing the paper with glue.
“Ascent”
“Monument”
“Savior”
“His Ledger”
“End Of The Line”
“Fringe Contender”
