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Manuel Vason’s artistic practice explores the relationship between photography and performance, presence and representation. He considers the capturing of a moment as an act of creation, as a ritual towards the illusion of immortality and as an exchange between who is in front and who is behind the camera. The collaborative nature of his practice shapes a unique hybrid art form and forms new vocabularies. His collaborations to date have become some of the most iconic images of performance, and his work has been published and presented internationally. Vason was born in Padua, Italy in 1974. He discovered his interest in photography while working in a black and white professional darkroom. After having assisted some of the most celebrated fashion photographers of his generation in Milan, New York, Paris, London and Los Angeles, he decided to pursue a Masters degree in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins at University of the Arts in London. The focus of his research shifted from the body as subject into the relationship between photography and performance. In 2002 he presented two books: Exposures, a publication on the body in Live Art (Black Dog Publishing, 2002) and Oh Lover Boy, a two-year collaboration with artist Franko B (Black Dog Publishing, 2002). In 2007, Vason’s first solo exhibition Encounters was presented and accompanied by a 230 page catalogue (Arnolfini/Cornerhouse). Vason is continuously developing a practice integrating different mediums and collaborative methods. Manuel Vason website: www.manuelvason.com Manuel Vason online archive of all his collaborations to date: www.artcollaboration.co.uk Double Exposures project website: www.double-exposures.com
'Manuel Vason is to Performance Art what Robert Capa is to war photography.' -- Franko B, artist 'Manuel Vason's images exist somewhere between portraiture, performance documentation, and documentary - or perhaps, his images are fashion shots, but the bodies are clothed in performance.' -- Tracy Warr, independent curator, editor of The Artist's Body 'Manuel Vason's startling and stylised images, powerfully reproduced in Encounters, violently force bodily abjection into the arena of the sublime. Not since the era of Caravaggio and Bernini has pain been so exquisitely and beautifully rendered - here, through Vason's capacity to connect, via the red-hot wire of aesthetic reduction, to the bodies that wield and convey it.' -- Amelia Jones 'Photography stages what it records; and subjects perform on that stage. In this age of the complicit auto-branding of the ‘Selfie’, it’s a relief to be reminded that the self and the camera are less knowable than we might think. In this book Manual Vason’s collaborative photographs along with a range of nimble writers reopen for us all the uncertainties and possibilities, the trapdoors and escape hatches that make the self and the camera such wild companions.' -- David Campany, writer, curator and Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster, London
