Name Charles Grogg | ||
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Charles Grogg (born 1966, Gary, Indiana) is an American contemporary artist and photographer. He currently resides in southern California, producing fractured photographic images printed in platinum and palladium on handmade Japanese washi which are restitched into whole images and frequently feature tethers, sutures or other three dimensional productions. The resulting images focus on issues of growth and restraint, hesitation and power.
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Grogg's photographic genealogy includes the early Vik Muniz, Robert W. Fichter, and Thomas Barrow, as well as Andy Warhol's sewn multiples. His work has been published in a variety of photograph-focused periodicals including LensWork, B&W, View Camera, Black&White Photography (U.K.), and Silvershotz. He is an Associate Professor of English at Santa Barbara City College (CA), where he has taught since 1998 and on the MFA faculty at Brooks Institute.
In 2010, Grogg was selected by John Wood for the Clarence John Laughlin Award, which is given to a photographer “whose work exhibits sustained artistic excellence and creative vision.” At the time, Wood was the editor for 21st Editions, a letterpress publisher of limited edition portfolios in photography featuring artists such as Michael Kenna, Jerry Uelsmann, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. In 2011, 21st Editions published “Cracked: the Art of Charles Grogg” featuring platinum/palladium prints from the series “After Ascension and Descent” and “Reconstructions,” and poems that John Wood, a two-time winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, wrote specifically for the edition.
Since that time, Grogg’s work has evolved toward digitally processed imagery and imagery resulting from the intermediary use of digital technology due to his self-professed artistic interest in the presence of the photographic surface.
"His philosophy is well thought out...he is a bit of a philosopher, a thinker about photography..."