Lumas Galleries Exhibition

Sara Deanna in Domestic Help Fantasy © Benjamin Kanarak

Lumas Galleries Worldwide

Just wanted to tell you that 15 of Benjamin Kanarek’s images are being shown at LUMAS Galleries throughout the world and on permanent display.  These are Limited Edition prints of 100 series per image and are 0.80 x 1.20 meters in size.
You may also request special editions directly via Benjamin Kanarek’s official website.
 

Critics of Benjamin Kanarek’s Work

CONFRONTATIONS WITH FATE

A fleeting glance, the forbidden desire, the transience of physical closeness. In a singular way, Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai manages to translate the emotional states of his films’ tragic characters into an impressive total work of art.

Together with cameraman Peter Doyle, Wong creates worlds of images that burn themselves onto their viewers’ emotional memories. Remembering Wong’s haunting work In the Mood for Love (2000), it is above all the protagonists’ feelings, longings, and disappointments that leave behind a lasting impression as an overpowering amalgam of colors and sounds.

When Benjamin Kanarek revives these moments of tragic love of 1960s Hong Kong in his series “In the Mood,” he assumes Wong’s aesthetic cosmos without attempting to copy it. The series is eager to spark a dialogue with the observer’s memory. If it’s true that smells can awake memories from days long gone by, then Kanarek achieves that with his works’ sensual stimuli. Brilliant colors, the tactile nature of the surfaces, and the dramatic contrasts of light and shadow allow the compositions to relive the felt moments of Wong’s films. Kanarek’s works find very much their own paths to engendering an image of atmosphere in the observer.

The photographer translates the felt moments of stagnancy in the relationships between two people in the exposed faces of the portrayed pairs. They come across cold, almost as though wearing masks, yet they bear Wong’s figures’ tragedy properly. If transience is always at the heart of photography, then it is the memory of a futile love that Kanarek has preserved in these faces.

Horst Klöver

 

MORE IS MORE!

The Canadian, Benjamin Kanarek (*1950) is multi-talented. Whether working as a fashion photographer, a music video director or Lancome’s creative director, he always goes all out/the whole hog. From Icon to Vogue, Harper’s to Elle, Kanarek has published in all the major fashion and lifestyle magazines. From still-lives to celebrities, his work spans from the personal to the sensual conceptions of beauty, which he likes to celebrate with extravagant female models.  Kanarek happily labels himself a beauty photographer, beauty not being classical elegance, but an opulent and baroque zest for life, indulgence to the fullest.

Less is more? Really? Kanarek’s fiery photographs, foregoing no details, can only make you shake your head as they satisfactorily prove: More is more!

David Gärtner

More Stories
Marlena Szoka in Harper's BAZAAR China by Benjamin Kanarek – Haute Couture