Having worked with many iconic and influential figures in American popular culture during the last 25 years, Reisig and Taylor have continuously (and collaboratively) advanced the evolution of the photographic image as a mainspring of popular culture, identity, and disidentifications (of not-yet realized personas). 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 analog and digital art—they have developed a driving body of work reflective of their scope, experimentality, and playfulness as artists, technicians, and photographers. Focusing on (nude) bodies and roving (land)scapes or spaces, their photographic work instigates and interrupts the normative or prohibitive barriers between intimacy and estrangement, anonymity and celebrity, sexuality and conviviality, releasing the full force of the aperture as a visual break from the ordinary reason and sedated vision of everyday life. Their photography is opportunity for contact with this rupture through the image’s startling proximity to memory and screens. Whether photographing a celebrity like Tupac Shakur 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.

However, their experimentation with the photographic medium was never limited to 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 (especially with 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, the artists’ 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. 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.