Stephen Chalmers

Last year Stephen Chalmers visited the University and I assisted the talk about his work. I thought it would be appropriate to look up a little bit more about him, to show his work during my presentation tonight.

Stephen has an M.F.A in Cinema and Photography, a B.A in Fine Art Photography, a B.S in Psychology and he is an Emergency Medical Technician. He is very active in the community, does workshops in digital photography, and is an active artist.

His work is very much Research oriented. I am going to focus on one body of work which is 'Dump Sites'. With little knowledge of the purpose and intentions of the artist, the images portray beautiful and very specific landscape. Upon reading the title, one realizes that there is more behind the surface of the photograph. Each images portrays the specific spot where a murder has taken place. He titles the image with the name of the victim and the date of the murder.

The artist interest is to create a memorial for the victim. He argues that in murders, people only remember the killer, as opposed to remembering the victim. So, what he wants to do is to create a memorial for the victim, and only focus on that.

He shoots with 4x5 camera and creates an area of focus where he believes, to the best of his knowledge, the place where the body of the victim was found.The images are beautiful, but they are juxtaposed by the disturbing title. He creates a play between life and dead, that juxtaposes a sad, true, disturbing event from the past with the present emptiness of the landscape that is left. He can play with the assumptions of the viewer upon first encountering the photographs, and the inevitable visual imagery that creates in each of them after learning more about them.

Check out his website: Askew-view

Images found on google: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=stephen%20chalmers%20dump%20sites&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi