Elad Lassry (Israeli, born 1977) defines his practice as consumed with “pictures”—generic images culled from vintage picture magazines and film archives. Lassry studied film at the California Institute of the Arts then earned an MFA from the University of Southern California. Tapping the visual culture of still and motion pictures, he engages traditions of story-building with images and the ghosts of history that persist in images long after they have been lifted out of their original contexts. “I’m fascinated by the collapse of histories and the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph,” he has said. Lassry challenges the means by which a work is structured visually. His vibrant pictures—still life compositions, photocollages, and studio portraits of friends and celebrities—never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page or spread and are displayed in frames that derive their colors from the dominant hues in the photographs. In their pop-culture subject matter, Lassry’s works mimic commercial photography. Yet the shots that may at first seem the most direct are complicated by double exposures, an occasional blur, or the superimposition of multiple negatives. Lassry often displays his photographs beside 16mm film projections. The presence of Untitled (2009), a film featuring actor Eric Stoltz as a choreographer teaching a dance routine to a performer in a red bodysuit, provokes tension between the overall impression of a film strip and cinematic temporality.
