Stephen Marc 

As a documentary/street photographer and digital montage artist, my work explores American identity and relationship to place with a focus on public space gatherings, from everyday rituals to special events. As a digital montage artist, I explore the strategies and objectives for combining photographs to extend the visual narrative, bearing in mind the constructive nature of memory, the influence of imagination, and the power of perception. I’m looking for the ways we connect to place, present ourselves, and interact with each other, while navigating the conundrums of coexistence.

I began the “street story montages” seven years ago. They are part of my ongoing An American Journey Continues project, with a couple of them included in my book: Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times (2023). Reoccurring subjects include mannequins, costumes and makeup, and other types of body ornamentation found at cultural festivals, parades, and on the everyday streets. Assembled utilizing two to six photographs, each digital montage is inhabited by at least one person. 

Sometimes appearing to take on a life of their own, these carnivalesque fusions of time and space include images from the Day of the Dead, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in the Pride Parade, a Festival of the Arts, and commercial district backdrops. Breaking the flow of normalcy are attention grabbing sales props, and more profoundly playful, ceremonial, or celebratory displays and performances. These routine breakers alternate between being glamorous, strange, and exotic; and when interwoven they become surreal spaces that make human presence enigmatic.

Stephen Marc is an Emeritus Professor of Art in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Raised between the South Side of Chicago and Champaign, IL, he taught at ASU for 26 years, following 20 years at Columbia College Chicago. Marc was the Spring 2022, Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair in Photography at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. He received his MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and his BA from Pomona College. Marc is a documentary/street photographer and digital montage artist, whose work explores American identity and sense of place.

Marc’s American/True Colors (2020) received an Independent Publisher’s IPPY 2021 Gold Medal for best book in Photography and was a Finalist for both best art book and best multicultural book of the year from the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times (2023) is his visual storytelling follow-up to A/TC that incorporates both digital montages and photographs.

Marc’s first three books were: Urban Notions(1983), that addressed the three African American communities in Illinois where he had strong family ties; The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience: Street Life and Culture in Ghana, Jamaica, England, and the United States (1992); and Passage on the Underground Railroad(2009). Since 2008, Passage on the UGRR has been registered as an Interpretative Program of the National UGRR Network to Freedom, a division of the National Park Service.

www.gftbooks.com/?s=stephen+marc