Andy Leborne
Lonely, but not alone
Jacobskerk, Photography, Winterswijk, Netherlands
Wednesday March 21, 2012 - Wednesday June 6, 2012 - Event ended.
Andy Leborne is a photo-artist and painter who lives and works in Luxembourg and Florida. Born 1965 in Germany, he grew up in Düsseldorf. Educated in professional photo techniques by the New York Institute of Photography, Andy began his artistic work with traditional small format 35mm film cameras. Soon he turned to larger formats and very early he started to use digital image processing. Today he embraces all the advanced techniques of digital photography. His work is conceptual; a taken picture serves as raw material, which is than freely composed for the final image.
Though his images advanced from pure realistic photography into the unique direction of combining people with related landscapes and objects, asking questions about the loneliness and surrealistic character inherent in life and things; there is an unmistakable influence of his instructor Jerry Rice, Dean of the New York Institute of Photography, who himself was a student of Lisette Model, an internationally renowned Street Photographer of the 40th, one of the great Masters of Photography.
LeBorne’s artistic position is characterized by complementary and controversial concepts. The frequent use of black and white photography in rather surrealistic images, for example, shows this, as black and white pictures are traditionally more associated with reality.
In the image ‚Surfing‘, for instance, a signature work of his, he stretched the foreground of the beach in relation to the sea artificially to a point, where the beach gets the spacey quality of the sea itself; a typical surrealistic switch Andy loves and of which his work is admired for. His ‘PhotoPaintings’ are unique. Here he paints or draws his subject first, only to take a photograph of it, which is then finalized as a digital image.
LeBorne wants his pictures understood as though-provoking to questions of the relations between people and reality. Is our whole environment as real as we usually feel it? And more importantly, might there be a way to escape, at least now and then?
Being a successful businessman earlier in his life, LeBorne lives and works rather reclusive today and his images are mostly collected by private clients and companies all over the world, which is a good match for his travel activities, as one of his fundamental ideas is, that he must be at the place where the perfect image subject can be found. Nevertheless he takes assignments now and then, if they are in line with his message; for instance the German ‘Computer Zeitschrift’ published his portraits of sales women, being the best in their field, or some architectural work for a real estate’s developers promotion campaign. His landscapes could be watched during a permanent exhibition in a private gallery in Stockholm in 2010.
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