At the nexus of the Floridian cultural void, there is a beauty to the sun-set drenched, air-conditioned culture of gated communities and the seedy swamp of degraded America. The color palette that paints over much of that dream (or nightmare) is a pastel rich mix of vibrant and clashing tones. Just as the depressed trailer parks and opulent bungalows rub against each other to disturbing effect, so does Maya Fuhr’s textural wonder objects and unique photographic inroads.
Maya manages to build work that subverts and forwards fashion, maintains and renews Artistic relevance for photography and does it all with genuine humor that isn’t cloying or boring.
Maya has done editorial work for legacy fashion editorials and brands such as ID, Gucci, Versace, Dazed, Purple and Vice and has shown her fine art extensively. Maya works with friends, celebrities, and the detritus of cool out-sider personalities who populate the fun fringes where playing with the grotesque and new is allowed and inherent.
But that doesn’t touch the heart of her work, or her heart. Under that examined degradation is a bigger love letter to the beauty that shines beneath the playful critique she offers. There is an intimacy she gains from her subjects that is very hard to replicate and is leagues beyond what many editorial and fashion photographers manage. Something simultaneously brilliant and opaque comes though as a philosophy, and we can feel her sensual and loving lens that each frame exposes.
Body love and freedom are on offer through her choice of set and settings that punch up, generating fun and dignity for her subjects as equally as they invite a gaudy opulence. Like a VR midway fair on acid as seen by an aristocrat from their four star bathroom. Yep, that’s an actual sentence; you can re-read that.
The use of abstract frames, textural joy-rides, color diffusion, and extreme saturation/desaturations, the photo-object as 3d explorations emerging from her sculptural photographic practice – gives us a new portal to light, clothing, and bodies. She offers a set up of the synthetic vs. the authentic and the organic vs. the decrepit creating the kind of tension that marks good Art.
I asked Maya to send me some photographs, which are presented without her commentary. I’ve attached here a link to her site so you can see the breadth of her practice (and more of what I’m talking about) and the ways that it transcends traditional portrait, abstraction, or editorial photography.
Josh Reichmann
April 2020
Elevate Your Vision
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