Adam Pape was raised in Smithfield, Virginia. He left Smithfield for college, and in 2006 received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. After graduating he received the Meyer Traveling Fellowship to work on a collaborative photography project in Turkey. In 2007 he moved to Chicago and began work as the photography department Studio Manager of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011 he moved to New York spending his week days working as a production manager and his nights and weekends in the wooded areas of the city making pictures. He is currently an MFA candidate in Photography at the Yale School of Art. Today we share his series, Skunks & Blunts.
Skunks & Blunts
In the city there are ways to escape the grid and walk along lines unseen. The parks of New York City offer this escape, eliciting both alienation and intoxication, where the rules are not the same. They allow citizens and nature both a space for development, a second city unto themselves. Like a church or temple, parks are transformative. My photographs utilize these city parks as the backdrop for a narrative that unfolds in between day and night, in between domestic and wild. The fictional image, directed and lit artificially, represents this transformation against and away from the grid. This liminal space of the city, a world within a world, is like a photograph – autonomous and composed – a microcosm its own.
To view more of Adam’s work, please visit his website.