SILVERTHORNE, Jeffrey - Directions for Leaving. Photographs 1971-2006

Background information, content

"The photographic work of Jeffrey SILVERTHORNE pointedly poses existential life questions about identity, gender, love, violence, sexuality, and death. His multi-layered oeuvre, which moves between intimacy and staging, was created in an examination of ancient dramas and painting traditions.The photographs of the U.S. photographer reveal a fascination with role play. The transsexual becomes the ultimate symbol. In doing so, he seeks ways to show his inner self, to make himself consciously vulnerable and attackable." (© Deichtorhallen Hamburg)
"Over the past 35 years, Jeffrey SILVERTHORNE has photographed authority figures, the naked, prostitutes, prisoners, illegal immigrants, frontier bars and cheap hotel rooms, carnival performers, people on the fringes of American society, dying animals, himself, and the dead.He is internationally known for the postmortem genre he founded, photographs of the dead that shock and repel, though they fascinate." Jeffrey SILVERTHORNE's subjects, captured in austere and uncompromising compositions, often gaze at the viewer with a defiant indifference; his work fuses portraiture with a kind of detached photo-documentary impulse à la Diane ARBUS.By exploring marginal figures and milieus, he confronts us with our own sense of disgust and grotesqueness." (© Annie Proulx in her introduction to this retrospective of photographic work, Fotografisk Center, 2007)

Additional Information

This monograph, 'Jeffrey Silverthorne. Directions for Leaving. Photographs 1971-2006', also includes a contribution by Robert FRANK and an interview with Detroit rocker Cary Loren.

About US-american photographer, Jeffrey SILVERTHORNE (1946-2022)

Photo books by Jeffrey SILVERTHORNE