Robert Stivers has explored the nexus of desire and memory in photographs that are hauntingly erotic. The images published here also possess a mysterious, melancholy feeling, and often turn on eroticism and death. For Stivers, the image is most often about the human figure in space, modeled by light, often reduced to the simplest forms. Embracing the abstract potential of the photograph, the artist mines the subconscious in a performative act of seeing and recording. This, the artist's first book, offers a contemplative visual journey. The photographs are accompanied by an illuminating essay by A.D. Coleman.

Robert Stivers: Photographs

Arts & Photography

Robert Stivers

Individual Artists

Arena Editions

A large volume, private exhibition of decadent classicism in contemporary photos. This unusual suite of photographs uses the poetic form of Sestina combined with other signature Stivers' elements: Romanticism, mysticism, Gothic and Baroque art, Symbolism and film. With a contemporary edge eerily recalling the past, the photos seem dredged up from a seance. Named after a complex French poetic form based upon repetition, the Sestina was practiced by Swinburne, Kipling and Auden, and transformed by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop. Here, John Woods' poetry illuminates Stivers' surreal imagery.

Sestina

Literature & Fiction

John, Wood

Poetry

Channel Photographics

Stivers takes us into alcoholic twilight. Shuddering exiles in watery purgatory, the human figures as well as forests, clouds, plants, works of art and even architecture seem never actually to have existed.... Each photograph visualizes the anguished lament of the current that runs through him... All of this mirrors his dream books and journals, where the trials of actual experience and his mind's nocturnal dream machinery are indistinguishable. Stivers' pictures are figments of his material philosophy of escape. -Eugenia Parry

Robert Stivers: Sanctum

TWIN PALMS

In his photographs Robert Stivers shows the difficulty of communication. Language, both spoken and visual, vies with the hard-won wisdom of age, the misunderstandings of youth, and the subtle art of reading between the lines.

The Art of Ruin

Photography & Video

Twin Palms Publishers

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Books by Robert Stivers