Fall ‘07 HHS Winner: Shauna Frischkorn
Robert (Playing Smuggler’s Run: Hostile Territory) by Shauna Frischkorn
Shauna Frischkorn
Currently residing in Willow Street, Pennsylvania
Website
www.shaunafrischkorn.com
Work Statement
My work explores popular culture through everyday life.
Game Boys is an ongoing portrait series of young men engaged in a familiar pastime—they are playing video games. For the past three years, I have been photographing video game players who come to my studio, sit in the dark, and play for hours while I quietly watch and shoot. The studio setting lends a theatrical quality to this commonplace activity. Sometimes, I watch the game to see a particularly interesting sequence, but mostly I just watch the game players. I seek to explore the popular culture phenomenon of video games by examining the “gamers� who play them. Because my work is rooted in the tradition of portrait photography, I look beyond the hype surrounding video games and focus on the players themselves. Traditionally, the belief has been that a portrait could tell us a great deal about a subject: a window into a person’s inner character could be found through facial expressions. Although the expressions on my subjects may appear to be passive, the gamers in these photographs are actually performing fast-paced maneuvers and executing split-second decisions, making these portraits of intense concentration.
Bio
Shauna Frischkorn received her MFA in photography from SUNY Buffalo in 1998. She currently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and teaches photography at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. She had a two person exhibition at Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in New York in April, 2007. Publications include American Photography 20, Time Magazine, and Mother Jones Magazine.
November 29th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
kinda reminds me of phil toledano…
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Or Toledano’s series reminds one of Frischkorn’s? I saw Toledano’s first some time ago, so that was my first reaction too. The concept and execution are almost the same. Similar enough to plant the suspicion of plagiarism by one party. But that’s probably not the case: the concept is simple enough to have been developed independently by both. I happen to like Frischkorn’s execution better, and it’s very interesting to see how different these two projects are despite conceptual and formal similarities.
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Toledano did this project around 2004 or so, so I doubt that he ripped off the idea. I have seen several similar projects since so I think it’s just one of those obvious ideas that’s in the ether at a moment in time. Toledano seems to be more about the agony, whereas Frischkorn is more interested in the ecstacy. But overall, the idea wears pretty thin pretty fast, and I hope everyone feels ready to move on now.
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:03 pm
i might as well speak up, just for the record…i did my video gamer project in the spring of 2002…a few of the shots appeared in the New York Times magazine a little while later (then Wired, Walrus, Le Monde and a few others that have slipped my soggy memory)…in fact, i think i showed them to jen maybe a year or so later…
now, as to who’s version is better..well, that’s just a matter of personal taste..:) (of course, i’d be inclined to vote for mine…)
phil
April 30th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Hi, I love you Shauna love your secret ed.