From Loring Knoblauch’s review for Collector Daily:
Contemporary photographers who are enthusiastically diving into the deep end of the newest interdisciplinary photographic processes would be well advised to study up on the photography of Mark Morrisroe. In the span of roughly just one short decade (the 1980s), Morrisroe experimented with an astonishing variety of photographic methods and processes, bringing a hand crafted, often glamorously romantic aesthetic to his investigation of personal identity. This show is an engaging sampler of effects and looks, from photograms and cyanotypes to sandwiched negatives and gestural inscriptions, each a layered, manipulated attempt to add meaning and resonance to an individual image.
Seen in the context of his Boston School contemporaries (Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Jack Pierson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and others), Morrisroe’s body of work seems infused with an unfulfilled, searching quality, sharing commonalities in the exploration of identity via portraiture with his contemporaries, but feeling more restless and unfinished in terms of finding his own voice. While his works are grounded in a similar personal intimacy (and the friends, lovers, and settings of his own life), his pictures reject a realist approach, opting instead for a looser, more filtered aesthetic experience. When he gets the alchemy just right, his photographs mix intimate immediacy and rich physical presence.
View the exhibition
Browse all of Mark Morrisroe’s work at ClampArt