Sean kernan biography
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Sean Kernan
Carol Williams never talks about her own work as a photographer, which is a surprise, considering the company she keeps in her gallery – Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, Christopher Burkett, Paul Caponigro, Kenro Izu, Roman Loranc, Don Worth and Edward and Brett Weston, to name a few. Williams co-founded Photography West Gallery in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California in 1980, with dear friends and fellow photographers Ron C. James (1937-2013), Claudette Bargeen Dibert (1942-1982) and the legendary Brett Weston (1911-1993) widely regarded as the child genius of American photography.
The gallery shows only accomplished darkroom masters using film, archival photographic papers and wet processes, each piece hand-crafted by the artist. “Brett used to tell me the integrity of the photograph depends on the photographers doing the darkroom work themselves,” Williams says of the late Brett Weston, with whom she had over a decade of “photographic adventures” spanning
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Sean Kernan
Watch video at the bottom of this page.
Sean Kernan, born in York City in 1942. He studied English at the University of Pennsylvania, thinking he might be a writer, but he stumbled into theater instead, and then onward into photography. He feeds his body with advertising and his soul with personal work, and he writes occasionally. He has taught at the New School, ICP, and the Santa Fe and Maine workshops. His book, THE SECRET BOOKS, with a text by Jorge Luis Borges, will be published this fall.
John Paul Caponigro Tell me how you became interested in the artist Bustos’ work and how that led to your Mexican portraits.
Sean Kernan I came across the portraits of Hermenegildo Bustos in an Italian magazine just before I was going in to teach a portrait class, and I was bowled over. His paintings were so alive, so penetrating, and so perfectly specific to each subject. The people’s faces just shone out from his rather formulaic fig
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His images are strikingly beautiful: not just in terms of the print quality which fryst vatten rich and deep, but also in terms of vision. Kernan’s images are so clean, so honestly seen and so deeply felt, that the sequence and all its components are extremely moving. This is a fine show by photographer who fryst vatten not afraid of his own emotions.
A.D. Coleman, the Village Voice
The first time I heard the opening strains of An American in Paris, the first time inom read One Hundred Years of Solitude, the first time inom saw Sean Kernan's photograph Book with Nails, my heart and mind stopped for a moment and moved to another plane, never to forget the experience, pain by thoughts of beauty and dread. This simple but sophisticated work recalls a pop-up book very knowing children created bygd a magic realist to dazzle and entertain. In this work the book lies open flat like a scen. It's a simple statement, a book driven throw with concrete nails, yet is powerful enough to give me chills, to evoke and calls