Richard Stanley

My late spouse, Albert Short, was a superhero fan and collected action figures all his life. For years, I pondered how to photograph these powerful effigies with whom we shared our home. A friend came for dinner and mentioned the “Gay Billy” dolls from the 1990s. “I have them!” volunteered my spouse. “I want to photograph them!” I retorted. We took Billy, a white boy, and his Puerto Rican boyfriend, Carlos, on our honeymoon to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. With Al as wrangler, I shot away and liked the results. So began a collection of 1:6 scale figures, props and photographs thereof. The initial subject matter concerned the shame that gay boys grow up with and that distorts their adult lives. I used the dolls to work out my anger over Trump. When Al died, my subject turned to dealing with my grief over his loss.

These photographs are for Albert Short.

BIO:

Richard Stanley’s latest work continues his longstanding interest in lensless photography. Lately, he explores the potential of the ubiquitous scanner by using this device as a light table for botanical subjects and printed matter. The results range from the hyper-realistic to the surreal.

Stanley states, “What I do is to discover the tertiary image created serendipitously when two images from a commercially-printed, double-sided page merge through the paper when placed on the bed of a scanner. 1 image + 1 image = a new, 3rd image. The idea is simple; the discovery of the third image is more complex. I look for how the new relationships of the images, posed by happenstance, trigger unintended or enhanced feelings. My results work like a kind of Rorschach image for me. The finding of newly-imagined marvel in the quotidian, vicarious experience of mass-reproduced media is the challenge of this group of images and what inspires my aesthetic experience and resultant art.”

Artists from the Pop Art era, such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and others, to contemporary artists, such as John Baldessari, also incorporated mass-media imagery into their work. The late UCLA art professor, Robert Heineken, employed a process similar to Stanley’s in the pre-digital era in the 1980s using traditional photographic processes.

He currently is working on a series of “windshield time” photos of the urban landscape as seen from the driver’s point of view. Travel photography is always of interest to him as well.

Stanley holds a Master of Fine Art in photography degree from Rochester Institute of Technology, where noted landscape photographer, John Pfahl, advised him on his thesis, which employed another form of lensless photography using homemade panoramic pinhole cameras and color film. The color contact prints from these cameras ranged up to ten inches wide by seven feet long. His work is in the collections of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, the Chicago Art Institute, the Cincinnati Art Institute and numerous private collections. Stanley lives in Los Angeles.