HARVEY FERDSCHNEIDER

Ferdschneider photographed the Vessel & Vegetable series between 1988 and 1989 in Ithaca, New York. Drawing on Victorian-era photography of women, where props were often used to represent ideals of female purity, he reinterpreted this visual language by substituting fruits and vegetables as symbols of fecundity. Working with the contact sheets of his male models to replicate the exact same poses when photographing his female subjects, Ferdschneider used this process to examine and challenge the inherent gendered implications of the camera’s masculine gaze.

Novelist Dennis Cooper once remarked that Ferdschneider, “create[s] tableaux so removed from the traditional bedroom setting and finessed with the help of such a plethora of art historical reference points —surrealism, psychedelia, punk, Kenneth Anger, you name it— that the models in question induce horniness only at the cost of a general disorientation.”[1]

In collaboration with his partner Bill Carney under the name SKID, Ferdschneider documented New York’s club scene in the early 1990s. His photographs were published in the now out-of-print-book New York Club Kids by Walt Cassidy. In 1993, the pair photographed celebrity portraits of the Icelandic recording artist Björk.