Along the course of my research for the next article in the Dope Artists series (Dope Photographers, coming this Saturday) I came across a single exhibition so sack-numbingly dope that I could not personally reconcile with dropping it into the official list and letting it blend in with the other riffraff.

I bring you Jaime Martinez. Specifically, the haunting series of animated photography in his 2009 collection of work. This is hands down the most effective appropriation of an innocuous internet technology (in this case, animated GIFs) for the sake of fine art in recent memory.

Martinez takes two to six pictures of the same youthful and somewhat unusual scene from slightly rotated angles and strings them together in GIF form to a jarring effect: these pictures achieve a sense of depth and reality that traditional photography has largely been unable to create since its inception. They retain photography’s unique ability to perfectly capture a single instant from a single perspective, and then give that instant life.

-

-

Other Notable Works

Related posts:

1. Dope Artists #02: Photography
2. Dope Artists #01: Mixed Media
3. Sick Animated Shorts
4. Photography