1961-

Adam Fuss is best known for his contemporary photograms of moving light, live creatures, and organic things. British born and based in New York, where he began exhibiting in 1985 to immediate acclaim, he has created photograms in color as well as the black and white, silver gelatin print medium. 

Fuss’s work is usually compared to early 19th century “sun print” photograms rather than cameraless darkroom techniques that evolved under the influence of Bauhaus innovators in the early 20th century. It’s easy to see how his affinity for the natural world puts him close in spirit to 19th century practitioners who exposed sensitized paper holding plants and laces to the sun, but technically, his darkroom photograms have more in common with Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray than William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins.

Fuss, trained as a commercial photographer prior to his art career, is heir to the visual culture and industrial-commercial photographic apparatus of the 20th century. The hot and cool logic of his work reflects this. His synthesis of a knowing, willful innocence and the visual syntax of industrial perfection has given his work its contemporary edge.