February 21, 2007
Colorful Photographs of the Inanimate That Run the Alphabetical Gamut
By PHILIP GEFTER
A is for apple. B is for boy. C is for cat. It’s really that simple in Neil Winokur’s portfolio of 26 supersaturated color portraits of generic objects (and an occasional living being): one photograph for every letter of the alphabet, from A to Z.
A native New Yorker, Mr. Winokur, 61, has been photographing everyday objects against color backdrops since the early 1990s. His alphabet, on view at the Janet Borden gallery in SoHo through March 10, includes new images as well as older ones, all printed on 14-by-11-inch Cibachrome paper, like a series of head shots.
“I photograph objects because they never move or complain about the way they look,” Mr. Winokur said in a telephone interview, his deadpan manner matching the look of his photographs. “Slowly, I’ve moved away from photographing people, period, and now mainly photograph objects. The only prerequisite is that they look good and fit onto my tabletop system.” The “system” consists of an old door draped with a seamless color backdrop.
Mr. Winokur’s more traditional portraits — of people — began in the early 1980s, when he spent a lot of time with artists in downtown Manhattan, where he still lives, and decided to, as he put it, “be their court photographer, in a way.”
Using a four-by-five view camera, he made straightforward, life-size, candy-coated color head shots of Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Peter Hujar, Philip Glass and other artists. His portrait of Holly Solomon was included in a 1984 show of recent acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art.
“When I started, my influence was the Hollywood glamour portrait,” Mr. Winokur said. “I thought if I did these very Pop head shots, the color background makes the person stand out. The photographs reveal every detail while telling you nothing about the person except what they present to the camera. You can make up your own story about the person, because that is the only information you have.”
He found the backdrops in his first portraits too subtle, so he began experimenting with colored gels and colored paper backdrops, eventually achieving a brighter and more saturated effect.
“These days, I mix gels to get more and more colors,” he said. “I guess my love of bright, supersaturated colors has something to do with 1960s Pop Art, and with the keyed-up palette of acrylic paints. In the late 1980s, I began using Cibachrome paper, which made it possible to take these intense colors one step further, introducing a metallic, plastic look.”
The simplicity of Mr. Winokur’s visual alphabet derives from the way children are taught to read. “I have young children, so I suppose I’m thinking more about the alphabet these days,” he said. “But I like that alphabets provide a foundation for all reading and writing, and that, similarly, objects — or images — provide a basis for learning and memory.”
We look at an object and think of the word it represents: the word “apple” pops into your head when you see Mr. Winokur’s portrait of an apple. That his bright red apple is on an eye-popping green background is a nod to the intensity with which children experience color.
“Young children see and recognize objects before they learn their names, or how to say them,” he noted. “My picture alphabet is both a simple alphabet for kids and, I hope, a group portrait of iconic 20th- and 21st-century objects.”
His candylike colors add a playful dimension to the sobriety of the objects, which are deceptively simple. He chose them for the ease with which a child might be able to identify them, but they also serve as a catalog of daily staples. Each one is intentionally elementary, “except for the letter Q, which was really hard,” he said. That letter is represented by a playing card, the queen of spades.
Mr. Winokur’s work fits into a photographic tradition extending back to the medium’s early days, when the length of an exposure could be an hour, and inanimate objects were the perfect subject.
“When I photograph objects, I present them out of context, isolated, divorced from reality,” he said. “I think the intense color of my work makes the artificial presentation even more so. The supersaturated colors make us see the objects in a different light: no longer ‘just’ objects but images to be considered, contemplated, dealt with.”
The Neil Winokur exhibition continues through March 10 at Janet Borden, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, SoHo; (212) 431-0166.
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