Still Lifes, Portraits & Parts

Still Lifes, Portraits & Parts brings together three interlocking bodies of work in which Daniel Gordon builds his subjects out of paper before he ever points a camera at them.

Gordon prints photographs scavenged from internet image searches and magazines, then cuts, crumples, curls and pins them into three-dimensional constructions: fruit bowls assembled from mismatched textures, geometric heads built from strangers' skin and features, sitters cobbled together from wallpaper and wrapping paper. He photographs the resulting sculpture under studio light and discards it, so the finished print is the only record of an object that otherwise no longer exists. The book was published by Morel Books in 2013 as a 102-page hardcover, with an accompanying essay by curator Eva Respini.

Gordon emerged from the New York photography scene of the mid-2000s as part of a generation reworking the studio still life and photomontage for an image economy built on search and appropriation. Still Lifes, Portraits & Parts remains one of the clearest statements of that method, treating the camera as the last, not the first, step in making a picture.