Biography
Steven Poster creates striking photographs that reveal the pathos and humor in everyday life. His black and white images often capture individuals in the context of their larger social milieu. Poster’s photographs range from urban settings to haunted rural sites, discovering in these places and in the people he finds there quiet moments of humanity.
Born in Chicago in 1944, Steven Poster’s interest in photography began at age ten. He went on to study design at Southern Illinois University, transferring to the Los Angeles Art Center College of Design to pursue photography. Returning to Chicago, he concentrated in both film and photography at the Bauhaus-influenced Illinois Institute of Technology, graduating in 1967. After college, Poster began a career in cinematography in Chicago, working on commercials, documentaries, and industrial films. He soon moved to feature films, working on Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and has been Director of Photography on films including the cult favorite Donnie Darko, Daddy Day Care, Someone To Watch Over Me, and Stewart Little 2. Recent projects have included to the Emmy-nominated Mrs. Harris and Southland Tales, which was in competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Poster has filmed acclaimed television movies including Roswell, and the award-winning Madonna video Like a Prayer. Poster lives and works in Los Angeles.
Over the past forty years Poster has taken photographs, developing a body of work consistent in its aesthetic vision and its human concerns. It is in storytelling that he sees the essential link between his film work and his photography. Early on, Poster was drawn to the photographs of Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson, with their focus on an intuitive, personal connection with their subjects. In contrast to many photographers, Poster eschews taking a mass of images, preferring to wait for the instant when unconsciously he realizes the picture has composed itself. This awareness of connection in the moment shows itself in a number of his most affecting images, which focus on a single individual in the midst of a crowd.
Poster sees in his own images a melding of photographic influences, including the documentary work of Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith, the humanism of the seminal 1955 exhibition The Family of Man, and the gritty slice-of-life photography of Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander. In the later pair he recognizes his own interest in the constant observation of life, with all its strangeness and fortuitous beauty. Poster has photographed both in America and abroad, traveling widely in Europe and Asia during the 1980s and 1990s.
Rather than working in extended series, Poster prefers individual images that both stand on their own, and collectively comment on the vagaries of modern life and personal existence. He has written, “Something triggers the impulse that makes me put the camera to my eye and press the shutter. This action seems at the best of times to be a completely automatic, unconscious act....My intention is to see beyond the humor and surface situation the unconscious meanings in the moment, and to see in each of these images a life force.”
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