From Donald Brackett’s article for Critics At Large:
Among such artists, the Montreal-born camera artist Chuck Samuels has excavated a particularly distinctive site of fetishistic image production that takes Foucault’s selfless admonition for turning ourselves into works of art quite literally. He inserts himself, or perhaps insinuates himself would be more accurate, onto and into the iconic images of many of the giants of classical and contemporary photography. He impersonates, occupies, haunts and inhabits famous portraits by remaking the setting and scene into an exotic kind of autobiography that builds an exceptional vibrational force when one views the succession of self-less portraits in his rogues gallery of image history. It’s a magnificent obsession, and one celebrated magnificently in the new book from Kerber, Chuck Samuels: Becoming Photography. In its pages, the self-reflexive impulse at the heart of almost all photographs is allowed to amplify itself to Olympian proportions via the deft Samuels skill at thematic projection and stylistic echo.