ROBERT STIVERS

Entered 7/21/07 by Lisa Horne, Graduate Student in Art History & Curatorial Studies, Summer, 2007.

Born in Palo Alto in 1950, Stivers began as a dancer, where he achieved success in New York. After a back injury forced him to stop dancing, he relocated to Santa Fe and picked up the camera. Essentially self-taught, Stivers began by choreographing specifically for the camera.

His first body of work was a very direct and probing studio portraiture series of fellow dancers and friends. Then, Stivers turned the camera on himself, creating a body of confrontational and powerful images that earned him his first artistic recognition. "Stivers exposes his anxieties and desire for transcendence more poignantly than just about any other living artist," writes John Stauffer, photo critic and professor at Harvard University.

That body of work is represented in Stivers' first monograph from Arena Editions published in 1997, ROBERT STIVERS: PHOTOGRAPHS. According to AG27 MAGAZINE out of the UK: "The elimination of hard edges...turns his subjects from shapes into forms, emphasizes the volumetric aspect of them, proposes them as shifting and mobile." Stivers' second monograph from Arena Editions, LISTENING TO CEMENT features images of clouds, the sea, architecture and faces, both real and cast in concrete many toned warm and golden.

"Robert Stivers." Photographic Gallery [http://www.phototroph.com/artists/robertstivers/bio.html] accessed 7/20/07.