Ellipsis

Stephen Posen is well-known as a painter, as well as a photographer, with work in the collections of The Guggenheim Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, among others. The work is very distinctive and beautiful, in addition to having a subliminal connection that the reader can immediately understand. This is Posen's first published book of photography and eagerly awaited by his fan base with huge potential for promotion because of the fame of his son, Zac Posen. Stephen Posen will be promoting the book in tandem with Fashion Week during spring 2015 and is exploring exhibition venues now that will soon be confirmed. New York artist Stephen Posen photographs the everyday world with a painter's eye, capturing compositions that often blur the lines between realism and abstraction. The 174 images compiled in his first book of photographs, Ellipsis: Dual Visions, represent a broad range of locations and subjects - ranging from Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia to a flea market in rural Pennsylvania, a vending machine of rubber balls to a contorted Barbie doll, all culled from decades of photographs in Posen's archives. The artist has arranged these images, taken in very diverse places and disparate times, in pairs, based on form, content, or some obscure magnetism, leaving the viewer to conjure a bridge between the two. The elliptical space between the images, like the series of dots that represents an omitted piece of text, becomes a third entity, pregnant with possibility. As art editor Scott Indrisek writes in the introduction to the book, "2 distinct photographs are made into strange bedfellows, and that's the joy: Finding connections where many see only a random chaos of image." The photographs collected here are playful, poetic, and endlessly compelling. They demonstrate the mastery and intuition of Posen's eye, both as a photographer and an editor, teasing elusive connections from the visual glut of the modern world.