Photographer Maxwell Snow

In Black Magic at Serieuze Zaken Studioos in Amsterdam, New York-based photographer Max Snow continues to pursue themes that have become the central preoccupations of his photography: beauty, fantasy, mortality. Expanding on the stark frontality and straightforward style that characterized the penetrating images of his earlier KKK series, Snow turns his attention in this latest suite of photographs to the time-honored subject of the nude, exploring the power and the poignancy of the human body in portraits of such hallucinatory clarity that his subjects seem conjured from the deep recesses of his own imagination as much as they do from popular culture or classical tradition.
Photographing nude models in an even studio lighting and against a featureless black backdrop, Snow focuses the viewer’s gaze firmly on his subjects by abstracting them from any precise time or place and capturing them in symbolically charged and often dramatic poses. In many of these images, Snow juxtaposes his nudes with live animals—a wolf, a bear, and birds of prey: real equivalents of powerful symbols of spirituality and revelation but also emblems of nature’s unflinching power and ferocity. In others, his graceful nudes are accompanied by objects—a crystal orb, a spear, an animal’s pelvic bone or antler—that seem freighted with symbolic significance yet which defy easy interpretation. Imbued with apparent meaning—here death and dying, there perhaps spiritual regeneration or potency—Snow’s photographic fantasy world of animals, objects and seductive bodies becomes less an arrangement of iconographic symbols than a labyrinth of enigmatic signifiers.

                                    
                                      >>>Maxwell Snow