continuing to look at photographers from Photolucida

Brooklyn photographer, Matthew Baum, graduated from Brown and later studied architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Matthew also earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and was awarded Chairman’s Honors and the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts, Hunter College and New York University.

Matthew’s series, Limelight, continues the “tradition of street photography, capturing fleeting moments of people in public spaces; but re-presents them as a kind of hyper-reality.” The images feel almost cinematographic in the absence of extraneous visual references, while focusing on a character or an activity.

“I do not set up my pictures and I do not use any artificial lighting. There is no setup. My post-production process affects the image, but mostly in that it no longer looks quite the way we are conditioned to expect a photograph to look. In that sense, I hope that my work begins to question our understanding of how photography functions as an arbiter of truth and reality. This is by no means a new issue in photography, but I hope that my work confronts this problem in a unique way that reflects the time in which we live.: