My first reaction to Sam Falls’ work was to say, out loud to my computer, “Sam Falls, who are you?” I realize that a more accurate question would have inquired about who Sam was as a photographer, as an artist working to visually document his world. Clicking through the large, screen-filling images on his website, a viewer is taken from a garishly pink close-up of cotton gingham and lilies, to the gray, decaying, furry remains of an animal on a forest floor. There are muted landscapes with hunched figures, surface studies of lurid wallpaper, portraits of both faces and the backs of heads. These often-disparate juxtapositions of subject are made more prominent by Sam’s play with form, color, light, and composition. His work strikes me as ambidextrous, even ambiguous, moving between themes and motifs, just as freely as he moves between style and genre. For all the technical and thematic in his work, the question of “who” is behind the work still seems important—there is a distinct feeling of the personal here, of Sam’s self, whoever that may be.
http://www.samfalls.com/
