From 'Woodpecker' by Jeff Bark, Courtesy of Artist and Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery
Jeff Bark had always wanted to be a photographer since he was twelve, “I used to write to photographers in New York and never heard back from them – now since I’ve been doing this – almost everyday I get a call from some kid,” he says.
When he did become successful as a fashion photographer, it was the lack of freedom in his professional life that led him to react against the standards of perfection imposed by the industry. When his London gallery suggested he focus on faces, he did the Flesh Rainbow series, deliberately obscuring the faces of his portraits with bags and bathroom plungers. “The reason I do this (art),” he says, “is because I don’t have anybody to tell me what to do with it.”
Jeff Bark, From 'Flesh Rainbow' "But Things Always Turn Out Fine" - Courtesy of Artist and Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery
“The most beautiful you can be,” Bark says, “is maybe for a week when you are seventeen. If you’re touching stuff up, it kind of fucks everyone’s head up. No one really looks like that. And you’re constantly judging yourself against something that’s not realistic.
“In my art photography I wanted to show people how they are. People seeing the Abandon series, might feel better about themselves after. You can see the beauty in a roll of skin, a patch of hair, so you don’t feel as bad about yours or you can be forgiving of others. I was never interested in nude photography, to me it seems stupid…”
Flesh Rainbow is a series of funny-sad portraits with a comic-strip-like narrative. The captions diffuse the overly macabre subject and add an impish quality, “Otherwise they are quite brutal,” says Bark, “like the girl with the plunger… but with a caption maybe she’s Pinocchio.”
"From 'Abandon' by Jeff Bark, Courtesy of Artist and Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery
“Bark describes the series, Abandon, “It makes you feel a voyeur. If you’re in the room by yourself you are totally relaxed, but if someone else was in the room you wouldn’t do it, if your boyfriend was in the room, you wouldn’t do it…it’s about the most intimate time when you are alone, and it’s a record of it.”
A sense of quest and solitude pervades his images, from optimistic waterfalls to people alone in their rooms protecting some intimate little secret. Bark sums it up, “Everyone wants the same thing out of life I think, everyone’s kind of lonely, everyone’s down, seeing it in a picture, you feel you’re not alone.”
Jeff Bark’s Lucifer Falls is on view at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery, September 9 – October 16, 2010, 537 West 24th Street, New York City
