Robert (Playing Smuggler's Run: Hostile Territory) by Shauna Frischkorn

Shauna Frischkorn
Currently residing in Willow Street, Pennsylvania

Website
www.shaunafrischkorn.com

Work Statement

My work explores popular culture through everyday life.

Game Boys is an ongoing portrait series of young men engaged in a familiar pastime—they are playing video games. For the past three years, I have been photographing video game players who come to my studio, sit in the dark, and play for hours while I quietly watch and shoot. The studio setting lends a theatrical quality to this commonplace activity. Sometimes, I watch the game to see a particularly interesting sequence, but mostly I just watch the game players. I seek to explore the popular culture phenomenon of video games by examining the “gamers� who play them. Because my work is rooted in the tradition of portrait photography, I look beyond the hype surrounding video games and focus on the players themselves. Traditionally, the belief has been that a portrait could tell us a great deal about a subject: a window into a person’s inner character could be found through facial expressions. Although the expressions on my subjects may appear to be passive, the gamers in these photographs are actually performing fast-paced maneuvers and executing split-second decisions, making these portraits of intense concentration.

Bio

Shauna Frischkorn received her MFA in photography from SUNY Buffalo in 1998. She currently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and teaches photography at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. She had a two person exhibition at Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in New York in April, 2007. Publications include American Photography 20, Time Magazine, and Mother Jones Magazine.