VIDEO: Michael Eastman at Barry Friedman Ltd | Art Miami

Interview transcript

Carole Hochman: I’m Carole Hochman, I’m the Director of Barry Friedman Ltd. We are a gallery based in the Chelsea area in New York, and we are showing at Art Miami this week. One of our featured artists is Michael Eastman. The work behind me is from a new series called “Urban Luminosity”, which explores how architecture and light play against each other. The photograph over my right shoulder is of the Grand Hyatt in Shanghai and it shows the view looking up from the 33rd floor up into the atrium.

Behind me on my left side is the Experience Museum (EPM – Experience Music Project) in Seattle and it’s a Frank Gehry building, and what he does is show how different light plays in different tones in the metal.

Michael is a self-taught photographer and he is best known for his photographs of Cuba and we are introducing the “Urban Luminosity” here at Art Miami. You can see also to the other side of this Gehry [photograph] is another detail of the same building with a very different feeling – much more static and less movement. One of the reasons Michael focuses on architecture is that he’s gone all over the United States when he did a series called “Vanishing America”, which [focused] mainly on middle America building from the 1940’s, ‘50’s and ‘60’s. Building that were in jeopardy of being torn down, so he’s always been interested in the patina, the age of the certain buildings, how weather affects it and so in this series, this is basically new architecture and how light plays with it because the materials are so different. However, if you look at his website you will see that he’s photographed architecture not only in Cuba, but also in Lisbon, [throughout] Italy, Budapest and all over the world. It’s basically portraits of people, without the people in them, so that’s a very interesting thing. There are lots of narratives and subtexts.

We have a photograph from Tokyo called “Golden Escalator”. It looks like there is light glowing from within the photograph. In fact, people have commented on the height of the escalator and how it, sort of, draws you in. It’s whatever hits him, is what he wants to feature. And they become very lyrical photographs.

This article and video © galleryIntell. Images © Michael Eastman, provided courtesy Barry Friedman Ltd

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