JEFFREY SILVERTHORNE (USA)

'DIRECTIONS FOR LEAVING'

JUNE 9th - JULY 29TH 2007

Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen has great pleasure in presenting Jeffrey Silverthorne, the exhibition and book 'Directions for Leaving - Photographs 1971 -2006’.
This project, curated by us and which we feel, in all modesty, will arouse international attention. The introduction to the book is written by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, whose books "Brokeback Mountain" and "Shipping News" have been successfully set to film.
A contribution by Robert Frank and an interview by veteran Detroit rocker Carey Loren, who had the group "Destroy All Monsters" with among others the artist Mike Kelly.

With Jeffrey Silverthorne there is a direct link to both Francesca Woodman and Diane Arbus. He knew Woodman personally from working and living in Providence, Rhode Island, where he still resides, and Arbus from New York. His early work with transvestites and transsexuals is also reminiscent of Arbus' work.
Jeffrey Silverthorne started photographing dead cadavers from morgues in the early 1970's and was an instrumental influence on Joel-Peter Witkin.

Up through the 80's and 90's Jeffrey Silverthorne has been pushing borders, both real, with life in and around the Mexican and American borders, but also imaginary and sexual, with the sexual playing a central role in his work.
This is also clearly evident in his latest work, from 2006, where Jeffrey Silverthorne stages Baroque tableaux that include himself with female subjects.

In the introduction "I saw It", Annie Proulx writes:

Over the past thirty-five years Jeffrey Silverthorne has photographed authority figures, nudes, prostitutes ready for business, prisoners, illegal immigrants, border bars and cheap hotel rooms, carnival denizens, people in the fringe worlds of American society, moribund animals, himself and the dead.
He is internationally known for the post-mortem genre he pioneered, photographs of the dead that shocked and repelled even as they fascinated.
Several of those photographs have achieved wide fame, as “Woman Who Died in Her Sleep,” showing a lithe young woman in a provocative pose, a slight smile as though about to awake to a lover; but she lies on a morgue table and the sensuality of the pose is belied by the coarse black stitches of the infamous Y-incision.

“Directions for Leaving”
204 pages, Illustrated., Publisher Fotografisk Center, ISBN 978-87-90362-38-6, kr. 225,-

Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11-17