Joseph Labate

Artist

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Joseph Labate

Tucson, Arizona 

Joseph Labate is the Chair of the Photography Division in the School of Art at the University of Arizona. Labate’s artwork and his teaching focus on the use of digital technology as applied to the medium of photography. He has a B.S. in engineering from Clarkson University, a B.F.A. in photography from Massachusetts College of Art, and an M.F.A. in photography from the University of Arizona. 

 
Labate is a recipient of a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, an Artist’s Grant from the Contemporary Forum of the Phoenix Art Museum,and an Artist’s Grant from Polaroid of Tokyo, Japan.  He has exhibited and taught photography nationally and internationally.  His work is in many private and public collections including the Art Institute of Colorado, Denver, the Center for Creative Photography, the Tucson Museum of Art, the SnellWilmer Collection, the Streitch Lang Collection, the Weeks Gallery and Roussenski Lom National Park in Bulgaria.
 
 
This work is from a series of “landscape” images with the term referring to its use as a genre in the history of photography, to the horizontal format for digital printing and to its figurative definition - the distinctive features of a particular situation or intellectual activity.  The images first begin as photographs I make with a digital camera.  The pictures are then opened in Adobe Photoshop and manipulated.  The “natural” color is replaced with an “artificial” one and I add a few simple digitally drawn components.

On one hand the images closely resemble “straight” photographs, yet on the other hand, appear to be obvious contrivances.  In each image there is a tension between the organic description created by the lens and the digital drawing and artificial color. The work treads the boundary between traditional photography and new technology and explores and examines the landscape of my life.
 
 

 Tucson 1000623

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 Tucson 2102553

 Tucson 3203187

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