Artist Post-Chris Saah

One of the artists that I decided to review on was Chris Saah. This former St. Mary’s College alumnus is a digital photographer who graduated with a philosophy major. Luckily I was able to have him as a professor this semester and therefore got a chance to really engage myself within his comments and work. Chris actually lives in Washington, D.C. but he traveled down here frequently to teach classes. After he graduated from the college he actually got an internship at the National Museum of American Art and then started working as a designer for different organizations and groups. His work actually involves the layering of several images together and then going through a process of mounting lights to create a deep space that seems almost unreal. By using tinted light Chris is able to create the perfect tone and hue for areas that he’s interested in exploring further through the photograph. In Photoshop he takes several images and starts to morph them together, washing out the color in certain areas and increasing it in others. This effect allows for his final prints to look surreal and as if they were set up. In a sense though, they were set up, which is one of the main things that I’m not too interested in. Although his final prints turned out beautiful, most of them seem to resemble a toy or put together stage for dolls. For example, in his print Displacement 12v, there is a lot of blurring of the foreground and background, and a meshing of yellow and brown hues that create an unreal depth to the photograph. It amazes me how just in Photoshop he can create a new landscape out of several, I just wish a lot of them didn’t look so staged.


Some inspiration that Chris left us with is to simply just shoot photographs and then make work out of your outcomes. I think that by this he wants his students to just have fun with the medium and to simply go and explore different methods and areas before even realizing what you truly want to work with. Overall I think that Chris’ method of working is quite different from me and my film photography, but I think it’s an interesting dive into the digital realm of photography. Even though I’m not a fan of digital work persay, I found his work to be a bit inspirational. The new worlds that he creates are evident of his philosophical background and the meshing of two or more spaces shows his exploration.