IT’S
TIME
© Damiani 2009 © photographs, David Benjamin Sherry © text, Neville Wakefield David Benjamin Sherry It’s Time Edited by Alice Rose George Photographs by David Benjamin Sherry Text by Neville Wakefield Graphic Design by Ryan Waller Damiani editore via Zanardi, 376 40131 Bologna t. +39 051 63 50 805 f. +39 051 63 47 188 info@damianieditore.it www.damianieditore.com Editorial coordination by Enrico Costanza Printed in May 2009 by Grafiche Damiani, Bologna. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical - including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system - without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
DAVID BENJAMIN IT’S TIME
SHERRY
INTRODUCTION BY NEVILLE WAKEFIELD
INTRODUCTION NEVILLE WAKEFIELD What is one to make of the errant child of photography who, having lost his way, is found wandering ecstatic and delirious amidst the forbidden pastures of fashion, fantasy, magic and sexuality, whose touretic outpourings lend color to the forests of artificial illusion, make fractal the desserts of our imagination and drip cum from the fruit of our endeavors? Perhaps only that after many deaths the Petri dish of consciousness and chemicals is once again alive. After all its been some years since Richard Prince shot the photography sheriff and even more so since Susan Sontag famously described the act of photography as a soft sublimated form of murder. Yet this is photography that would murder to be killed. Promiscuous even in death it takes the hollowed out empty forms of the past and fills them with piss and pedantry, love and idolatry to create its alchemical mash-up of what has been and what has yet to come. And so if one man’s graveyard is another’s playground then what we are looking at, far from being the ghosts of known pasts, are the spirits of new and unknown futures. Nor should the fact that such futures appear held in the fuzzy-
logic, mysticism and blistered fantasy deny the possibility that amidst the saturations of smoke and mirrors are the inklings of a brave new world of footloose irreverent hedonism and real irradiant fictions. The road of this excess may lead to the palace of wisdom. But along the way it must pass through the wilderness baptisms of light and darkness, desert and fire. As if to acknowledge this David Sherry takes himself in the death valley of Antonio’s Zebriskie Point, one step away from its explosive denouement. There he chooses to depict himself not as a refugee of Berkeley but of Hollywood, turning himself for all to see into his very own golden Oscar. Equal parts bare-assed imposter and barefaced liar such hilarious audacity takes cause not with photography but with photographic authority. Like Keith Richard’s claiming “I don’t have a drug problem I have a police problem’, images such as these take their dissolute, narcotic affront not from the presumed freedoms that allow them to be equally wrong and fucked up than from their disdain for any academy that says otherwise. The aliens are here. That’s it. That’s all.
V
To Lily Wheelright
VII
PHOTOGRAPHS
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