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Schaffer's work is also in stark contrast to the gigantic photography that ruled the art world for most of the '90s and '00s (and still prevails in many quarters). The German Andreas Gursky is the poster child of that style, and Schaffer's Somali Farmers Market brings to mind Gursky's famous 99 Cent: They are strikingly similar in some ways, but Somali Farmers Market is everything 99 Cent is not.
Grad school was full of conversations about reality, but it felt more like "reality."
Schaffer's show, wistfully titled After the Trees Have Grown, is an occasion to think about what photography (and art) is and should be, all over again. He's a great addition to the Seattle scene, and his show closes end of day tomorrow. Here's my full review, with lots more images.
"For me," Schaffer says, "reality is walking around,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], talking to people, having experiences, and seeing what the world is like in a visceral way."
Gregory Schaffer is having his first big solo show in Seattle, at Gallery4Culture. Like Isaac Layman, Ross Sawyers, and Chris Engman, he went to UW for art school and studied photography. But he's following a different path—one that cuts not through abstract ideas but through a specific place:
South King County is Schaffer's territory. This is important: He is a photographer with a territory. And it's not metaphorical, but actual, terrain. He lives and works on Beacon Hill; he manages the youth program at the nonprofit Refugee Women's Alliance, located at 4008 Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. He started there as a volunteer, when he was in graduate school for photography at the University of Washington (2002—2004).