Charlie White

Charlie White is an amazing artist that works in photography and video.  White assisted artists such as Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham and studied with Marilyn Minter, while in New York.  He moved to Los Angeles in 1996 where he attended school and studied with artists such as Steven Prina and Christopher Williams and he received his MFA in 1998.  White uses a combination of artifice, make believe and fiction to represent the human condition.  Many of White's photographs explore America's social tensions in regards to identity and society's perception of this concept.  White's early works were similar to the practice of Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall (also mentioned in my blog), these artists work  by staging scenes and photographing what they've created and sets the narrative that they are portraying.  His series include, "In a matter of Days (1999)" and "Understanding Joshua Tree (2001)" where he plays between reality and fiction shown above with the monster creatures in the photographs.  He has done many series that deal with narrative tableau that have dealt with religion and pop culture, he also did a series "Everything in America(2006)" that dealt with reconstructing historical instances of collective trauma and anguish such as the Manson Murders.  In 2008 he began doing a series entitles the "Girl Studies" where he did 3 years of research and production that expanded far beyond any other works he had done prior.  This series was the widest range in White's practice and further evoked his interest of the American cultural critique, which has been his interest from the beginning.  The Girl Studies featured images of a young girl standing next to a transgender man and the significance of the images were the similarity between the figures even though they were opposite sexes at birth they were still similar at least of an adolescent female, the image above is an example from this series.  Charlie White takes an interesting approach to his photography and the purpose or response he wants from his viewer is one of understanding his point of view.  Charlie White continues to work today and also is making videos in response to the questions that his images create for him.  

Check out more of his works at his website:

 http://www.charliewhite.info