Having worked with many iconic and influential figures in American popular culture during the last 30 years, Reisig and Taylor have continuously (and collaboratively) advanced the evolution of the photographic image as a medium of popular culture, personal identity, and social revolution. And also as a bridge between documentation, (commercial) labor, and fine art: as a shifting mode of cultural production. Beginning in the 1990s with album covers and portraits of hip-hop/ R&B artists—and now with mixed-technique lenticular images—they have developed a driving body of work reflective of their scope, experimentality, and playfulness as artists, technicians, and photographers. But from the very beginning, their work starts at home, with their own relationship and their children: capturing loved ones in domestic spaces and on family vacations. This sense of candid intimacy is sustained even when working with celebrities like Tupac Shakur, Salt-N-Pepa, Backstreet Boys, Michael Jordan, Roger Federer. Their tender approach to each subject as a radical body whose image and imagination is always in flux, whose person is constantly being reimagined, provides a tidal movement of bringing the familiar into the unfamiliar—the stranger into the home. Instead of using an image to determine who someone is, they encounter someone as a starting point for all the connections any image holds between a body and the gaze of those that are looking. Whether photographing someone famous or a personal family friend, they always maintain a certain tension between the world as it is seen and the world as it is lived: preserving an aesthetic demand to see the world as we live it, flickering, and hidden in plain view.

Focusing on (nude) bodies, California flora, roving (land)scapes, and interior spaces, they work-through prohibitive barriers between intimacy and estrangement, anonymity and celebrity, sexuality and conviviality. releasing the full force of the aperture—and the gaze—as a visual break from the ordinary reasons and sedated visions of everyday life. Their photography, and in particular their lenticular work, is an opportunity for contact with this rupture through the image’s startling proximity to memory and screens.

While the tradition of portraiture is evident across all of their practice, their experimentation with the photographic medium was never limited to a single genre or an isolated notion of the photographic image; rather, the photograph is recognized as a mutating envoy into questions of light, dimension, and transformation. In its earliest forms, this experimentation played-out in their work with the fluid chemical transformations of analog photography, as is seen in the series of flowers recorded on polaroid film. Erratic treatments were performed in order to infringe on the expected orderly outcome of a development left undisturbed. By manipulating film in the middle of the development process, the artists found ulterior photographic spaces and times that would otherwise go unnoticed in an unperturbed process.

Most recently, this interstitial, mid-process experimentation has evolved in step with diffuse contemporary techniques and technologies, interweaving analog photography, digital photography, painting, collage, and the lens itself in the creation of their lenticular assemblages. These lenticular assemblages are as eclectic in their technicism as they are in their playfully serious suite of subject matter. Ranging from images of popular icons to images of urban spaces and landscapes—all of which continue and extend the mixed practice of their early photographic work—their body of work feeds into itself, moving into the past, the present, and the future at one and the same time. This cycling of different times and disjoint ‘levels’ of taste is demonstrated by the history embedded in the lenticular medium, which started circulating as early as the 1940s as “kitsch” keepsakes or Cracker Jack prizes. They have usurped this initially low-brow material and aesthetic and pushed it to its absolute limits as a ‘fine’ artwork. This recurring transformation of the everyday into the never-before-seen repeats the same movement as their oscillation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the canny and the uncanny. Again and again, their work navigates an eternal return to the question of an image as object, offering a singular view only made available by their structural intervention into the space and time, the before and the after, of the photograph.