Alfred Gescheidt

Alfred Gescheidt at Higher Pictures. "...Rooted in traditional art practices and possessed of an idiosyncratic, at times hallucinogenic vision, simultaneously mocking and flattering American sensibilities, Alfred Gescheidt developed a rich body of work in a genre of photography that has few masters. His technical skills dazzled, even confounded fellow professionals. Through montage, collage, double exposure, retouching, re-photographing (always his own images, and in various states of manipulation), distorting lenses – shifts in scale, startling juxtapositions, hybrid forms and elastic anatomies, antic humor, a mischievous sense of eros, and a keen awareness of the complicity and duplicity of photography itself, Gescheidt rendered a compelling metamorphic pictorial world. There the mundane, commonplace, and conventional are transformed into witty, indiscreet, seductive, and certainly fantastic alternatives. His friend the cartoonist Rube Goldberg said to him, 'Youʼre a genius! Your pictures donʼt need captions.' And indeed they zero in on the visual heart of the matter, needling the optic nerve."