Michele Serchuk
Michele Serchuk · Source: New York Artists Circle · Rights retained by the original rights holders
- Medium
- Photography, Dye Sublimation, Pigment Print, Silver Gelatin Print
- Practice
- Photography
Michele Serchuk is a native New Yorker who has been creating evocative, intensely personal photographic portraiture for over thirty years. In 2014, the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival named her a Master of Erotic Art. Her w… Full biography
Biography
Michele Serchuk is a native New Yorker who has been creating evocative, intensely personal photographic portraiture for over thirty years. In 2014, the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival named her a Master of Erotic Art. Her work has been exhibited in group shows and arts festivals across the U.S. and Europe, including in New York, Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Portland, San Francisco, Montreal, Berlin, and Budapest, as well as in solo exhibitions in New York and Philadelphia. She has lectured at the Kinsey Institute and has led workshops and delivered talks about her work to various groups throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Artist statement
My portrait work focuses on creating a setting where I can find and capture an emotive moment in time, revealing the self and realizing a genuine collaboration with my subject.
Thirty years ago, I began shooting interior portraits exploring the erotic lives of my subjects. This early work, initially shot on black and white film, utilized sexuality as a path to explore the intimate self: sexual identity, erotic expression and relationships. The resulting portraits became a visual expression of these experiences.
Collaboration has always been central to my artistic practice. Working together, my subjects and I identify the aspect of self or the story we wish to explore, selecting props, wardrobe, and environments to give the narrative visual expression. My established practice of finding the perfect moment, first developed in film photography, remains core to my current work, whether digital or on film.
In the past fifteen years, I have expanded my exploration of intimate portraiture beyond the erotic. Using dreams, characterization, personal narratives, and the construct of fairy tales, my subjects and I continue to explore personal identity and emotional experience by telling stories of their hopes, dreams, fears and ambitions, their remembered pasts and desired futures. Just as I began exploring these internal portraits of self in my erotic work, these narratives become more formalized in my "Waking Dreams," "Modern Fairy Tales," "Pain Within," and "Portal" series.
