It’s common knowledge that the designer and “Project Runway” judge Zac Posen has always had a quirky and creative eye — long before he began creating ethereal and dramatic gowns for the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Naomi Campbell, he was repurposing yarmulkes for Barbie doll dresses. Perhaps less known is how much of the designer’s appreciation for visual shape-shifting can be credited to his father, the artist Stephen Posen, whose new photography book, “Ellipsis: Dual Visions” ($75, Glitterati), is out this week.
The senior Posen — a successful abstract expressionist painter of the ’70s SoHo art scene — began increasingly to turn his attention toward photography a decade ago. He established a personal game: capturing perspectives from the world around him, in places as far-flung as Cambodia, China and Turkey, and as close to home as Pennsylvania and New York Fashion Week, and then pairing images together. The combinations are initially disparate, yet connected by certain details upon closer inspection.
As a father and husband, Posen had always served as family documentarian. Then came the advent of digital photography, which brought to the process the immediacy of sketching. “I was off and running,” he says. He took his camera everywhere, shooting everything: a discarded wig on a SoHo street; the backyard pool of his Bucks County home; a display in a Parisian nail salon; a urinal on a Chinese train.
The result is “Ellipsis,” which consists of 174 paired, unedited images, culled from an archive of several thousand. Individually, the photos might seem ordinary; juxtaposed, they play with perception and negative space, transcending the dailiness of their subjects and approaching the realm of metaphor and optical illusion. “I think of them as flexible in meaning,” Posen explains, “each image not locked into what it literally or overtly represents, but capable of changing if put next to another photograph.” Above, Posen shares the stories behind six of the pairs in the book.
