The pictures I make as an observer, a modern-day Flaneur with a camera, only begin to make sense of all this change. I do believe if you look consistently and enough, daily life can become theatrical. And that the camera has the potential to capture the un-staged beauty of the everyday in a form of photographic theatre. The people moving through cities and in my viewfinder are strangers that I likely will never know. And that’s OK. The quotidian canvas is a non-fiction one. I do know that everything contained in my pictures existed in that moment in time. The camera does record what’s in front of it with some kind of truth. This nonfiction setting — from the backdrop of buildings to the clouds in the sky clearly existed in that moment. The people moving through that backdrop often remain unknown, some kind of fiction, and I do prefer it that way. Because I will always wonder who they are, where they are going, what they are thinking or feeling amidst the larger frame of our shared urban experience.
Longmen Art Projects | Shanghai is delighted to announce the gallery’s first collaboration with an artist dedicated to fine art photography. Opening on Saturday, August 12, 2017, and running through September 16, 2017, The Shanghai gallery will present 33 works from Daniel Lee Postaer’s Motherland series. Furthermore, Longmen Art Projects will extend the show into the upcoming Photofairs | Shanghai, where Longmen Art Projects will present 12 additional representative works from Postaer’s Boomtown series (photographs taken in San Francisco, another fast-changing metropolis thanks largely to the booming IT industry) in booth C06. A representative work titled Beijing VIII, 2015, will be also shown in the fair’s curated exhibition: Insights | A Color Explosion.
Born in Chicago in 1978, and raised in Los Angeles, Daniel Lee Postaer’s inherited his deep fascination with China through his Shanghainese mother. Since 2014, Postaer has been pursuing his Motherland project with a keen eye attuned to the identification and juxtaposition of strange anomalies lurking in plain view, overlaid with an inquiry into the relations of duty and possibility at the human interstices between that which has happened and that which is about to happen. Postaer’s highly detailed color photographs are eerily familiar, creating subtle and powerful questions around our current experience of the Urban.
Postaer graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), an academic center of West Coast American modern art. The Institute is devoted to the study of the intrinsic and philosophical values of art-making. It was no coincidence that Postaer chose to study at SFAI – the institution’s methodologies complimented his own character and spiritual pursuit – deeply influencing his artistic style. Postaer has tremendous respect for the nature and rules of photography, and he maximizes the functionality of photography in his artistic expression. Different from the multi-disciplinary trend of contemporary photography on the East Coast, Postaer’s work is distinguished by its exploration of the fundamental questions of humanity, philosophy and aesthetics.
Postaer’s large-format photographic works, un-staged yet controlled, with a touch of humor, present his feelings towards urban life. Through the microcosm of current social values, he dialectically captures and narrates the truth and beauty hidden within the quotidian moment.