His staged photography incorporates these memories alongside themes of urbanization.
I reject the idea I'm doing "staged photography".
Above all, he had a flair for storytelling through startling staged photography.
With financial backing from Mrs. Bettencourt and L'Oréal, he staged photography and art exhibitions at regional museums in France.
"I'd been working with a camera in the studio, doing a lot of staged photography, when I started to look at things outside," says Derges.
Everything here is otherworldly, from the knitted cars to the giant accessories, and he invests the images with a definably English sense of whimsical humour that is often missing from this kind of staged photography.
His careful creation of an artificial world, sometimes with abstract shapes and pseudo furnishings and structures, was a forerunner of the staged photography that emerged significantly in the 1990's.
Postmodern staged photography has come a long way since the time Mr. Cumming made his subtly subversive "Straw House" (1979) and Mr. Nicosia his wackily subversive "Domestic Drama No. 4" (1982).
Her carefully orchestrated large-format photographs — which came to include a wide variety of objects and, later, people — anticipated in some ways the now-prominent practice of more elaborately staged photography by artists like Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand and by Gregory Crewdson, who studied under Ms. Groover at the State University of New York, Purchase, where she taught for more than a decade.
For a sense of how fast and erratically the current art culture is moving, consider that just last summer the New Museum mounted another international roundup, "After Nature," selected by one of the "Jesus" curators, Massimiliano Gioni, which heralded a revival of humanist sentiment and existential anguish, notably in figurative sculpture and staged photography.
