Diane Arbus Photographing the Doppelgänger Twins" Images © 2011 Sally Stockhold All rights reserved
"Photographer Sally Stockhold startles with her staged self-portraits"
By Kyle MacMillan Denver Post Fine Arts Critic Posted: 06/17/2011
After a career in commercial photography and film in New York City, Sally Stockhold is enjoying a new chapter in her life as something of a cult figure on the Denver art scene.
Her central focus has been a group of self-portraits in which she photographs herself as famous and infamous artistic, historical and literary figures, ranging from Ayn Rand and Leni Riefenstahl to Alice Neel and Diane Arbus .
For each of these complex, partially hand-colored compositions, she assembles elaborate sets that often incorporate impeccably crafted backdrops and props that would be worth showing on their own.
Forty-one of Stockhold's under-recognized photographs — her largest exhibition to date — are on view at Pattern Shop Studio, an alternative art space at 3349 Blake Street, Denver, Colorado.
Some curators and other art insiders have been leery of these images because they are contrived, stagey and a little bizarre, but it is exactly those qualities — all intended by the artist — that make them so intriguing.
In fact, it does not seem much of a stretch to count Stockhold among the most daring and original photographers at work in Denver."
