DigitalResearch

Name: Warren Neidich
Sample of work: Conversation Maps, American History Reinvented (book)
Birthplace: United States
Location: New York and London
Age: 49 (born 1956)
Focus of work: photo/video

Warren Neidich has a background neurobiology. He has opened (and closed) his own gallery. He has authored and or collaborated on a handful of art books, as well as created a sizable catalogue of digital art. And he goes on.

There is a strong emphasis in his work on how we perceive the world and attempting to distort images of reality in a way that will make it more true to the subtext of the events. This comes through in pieces about direct sensory activity and responses (Conversations Maps) as well as emotional and intellectual responses (in Beyond the Vanishing Point and Camp OJ, photographs taken during the OJ Simpson trial).

In the late 1980's, Neidich gained recognition for his photography in a project and book entitled "American History Reinvented." In an interview by Charles Gere, Neidich states,

“I had been doing work more about cultural discourse and visual culture. I had been doing this project called American History Reinvented, which concerned the nature of the photographic document as it was linked to the historical archive. I reinvented that archive by creating my own parallel one in which actors dressed in period costumes reenacted scenes from five different periods of American History and these images were modeled on ones I had researched in the archive> However in my new versions a reversal of power dynamics occurred as people of color stood in for Caucasian counterparts in position of power and ownership.�

In 1995-1996 he spent time photographing the “media making� that went along side of the OJ Simpson trial. In this work none of the scenarios were staged (not by him at least) and he used only wide-angle camera lenses to emphasize the surreal feeling. “I photographed it like I would the backstage happenings at a rock and roll concert,� the artist recalled in the above interview. And in comparing this series with American History Reinvented, Neidich states “in the case of OJ, the whole equation becomes completely reversed in the sense that now reality looked like fiction rather than producing fiction that looked like reality. �

This year, Neidich exhibited a collection of work at Steinberg Fine Art Gallery in New York, NY. His interest in media, and how we read that media persists. In this series each of the images features a subject peering through the cutout eye shapes on a magazine's cover.

Vivid and more thorough descriptions of Neidich's work can be found in this article by Regine Basha in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

See Warren Neidich video footage here.