Sunburn in Naples

source: breasouders

Editorial and Commercial representation: East Photographic, NYC/London

Brea Souders is an artist based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, including Daniel Cooney Fine Art, Abrons Arts Center and The Camera Club of New York, the Hyères International Festival of Photography & Fashion, France, Camera16 Contemporary Art, Milan and the Singapore International Photography Festival. She has received a Darkroom Residency at the Camera Club of New York, a Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation fellowship at the Millay Colony of the Arts, and a Women in Photography/LTI-Lightside Kodak materials grant. Souders’ artwork has been featured in New York Magazine, Vice, Dear Dave, Real Simple, Conveyor and Creative Review, and she has photographed for the New York Times T Magazine, Marie Claire, Le Monde Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, WSJ Magazine and L’Officiel Art.

PRESS CLIPS

The New Yorker, Goings on About Town, John Mann and Brea Souders, 2013:

Two photographers who take a playful approach to their medium make an entertaining pair. Souders scatters snippets of old negatives on shiny sheets of acetate, then photographs them as random collages—bright shards of color, some as wispy as blades of cut grass. Save for a few recognizable images, these are jazzy abstractions, funny and fresh.

Vice Magazine, The Holy Trinity Issue, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2012:

Brea Souders sometimes takes portraits of celebrities for glossy magazines, but we’re more interested in her other work, which tends to veer towards minimalism–surreal, meticulous compositions that feature body parts, sea shells, shadows, dark clusters of leaves, and other things that she transforms into images resembling paintings with hidden messages.

Dear Dave, Magazine, Mark Alice Durant, Issue No. 11, 2012:

Brea Souders is a photographer whose deceptively simple images sometimes infer the celestial realm indirectly. Her Modern Day Halo #3 shows a delicate hand placing a circular lens, golden and somewhat tarnished, against the sky, perhaps replacing the sun itself. This image is assertive and enigmatic, re-imagining the holy aura from Renaissance paintings as something earthbound yet still generating a mesmerizing radiance. Royal Blue traces a delicate lace pattern hovering over the loveliest cerulean (a color term with its origins in Latin for heaven) this side of a Bellini Virgin. As in many of Souders’ images, Royal Blue seems to emit a luminescence as if it were not simply reflecting celestial light but was the source of it. With nary a horizon line, her soft colors and fragments of objects scatter across her frames as if in a pastel archeological dig. Hers is a world of images that limn the space between the material world and the illusive realm of appearances.

Humble Arts Foundation, Wendy Given, 2012:

She delicately and poignantly reminds the viewer that wherever you go, there you are…and perhaps delving further into her unique perspective of essential being and locus provides a contemporary tenor of memento mori.

Ariel Shanberg and Akemi Hiatt, curators of Surface Tension, Center for Photography at Woodstock:

Using fabric, mirrors, magazine cutouts, and fragmented representations of her own body, Souders composes surreal and dreamlike scenes which oscillate between flatness and illusionary depth. In her efforts to establish a legitimate connection with her personal ancestry, she both utilizes and contradicts the photographs traditional role in preserving memory and connecting lineage. The result is a seductive, yet unyielding surface.

Bangstyle, May 2, 2012:

Using strategically placed objects, ambiguous settings, and compositions that exist outside of the realm of time, her personal work can only be placed among the avant-garde – a space left to the aesthetically sublime, the strangely ineffable work that cannot be broken down into critique. Souders’ photography might be the perfect marriage of old and new – rooted in tradition while exploring the digital frontier. Her projects like “Counterforms,” a series that utilizes mixed-mediums, Impressionist pastels, vintage photographs, and digitally enhanced manipulation techniques, prove that there is a place for both in the vast and growing world of aesthetics.
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source: featureshoot

Brea Souders is a fine art photographer based in New York. Of her work, she writes:

As an American with typically mixed bloodlines, I started this project to explore the many places in Europe where I have ancestry and their influence on me as an artist and a person. I created the very first photograph in this series in Italy in May, 2010, titled Sunburn in Naples. This image encapsulated my feelings – a desire to own my Italian ancestral roots, to be wholly a part of something, but an inability to do so. The Neapolitan sun burned the Irish skin that I inherited from my father’s father. Upon my return home I continued my work, creating images that reflect my research of Christianity, art history, European history, family traditions and my desire to connect all of the pieces together into one unified whole.

I recently completed a long residency in France, where I continued this project with a focus on the experience of living as a foreigner in a place where I have ancestry. The images created in France have taken a looser and more personal turn, with special attention to my own interaction with the French landscape and with objects that I found along the way. The images speak to sudden feelings of freedom, curiosity and transformation, and to a world that became larger, less static and more confounding. The resulting photographs reflect a shift that took place within me as a result of spending time in my ancestral country, France.