DOUG AND MIKE STARN
American
Doug and Mike Starn are identical twins who work
collaboratively on photography-based art. For the
Starns, photographs can manifest themselves in a
variety of manners: installations, kinetic photo-
sculptures, and illuminated photoworks. They
received recognition early in their careers (the late
eighties) for work that questioned and extended the
definition of photography. Characteristic of their
early work were large collages of well-known
images from the history of art, toned either blue,
yellow, or brown, and roughly pieced back together
with cellophane tape. By 1987, they had been
invited to participate in the prestigious Whitney
Biennial in New York, and three years later, they
were the subject of an exhibition that toured the
United States.
Mike and Doug were born on May 18, 1961, in
Somers Point, New Jersey. During high school in
New Jersey, Doug and Mike discovered their inter-
est in photography, and they went on to study at
the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
from 1980–1985. Since their student days, the
Starns have shown that to them photography was
more than the perfect, unblemished print promul-
gated as fine-arts photography since the 1930s, and
they have continually, purposively drawn attention
to the photograph’s status as an object. Their early,
large-scale photographic constructions also re-
flected the ambitiousness of neo-expressionist art
of the 1980s, a decade during which increasing
numbers of artists were incorporating photography
into their work as photographic truth in a media
culture that was no longer taken for granted.
The Starns’ work is visually enticing in its
mimicking of antiquated, nineteenth-century qual-
ities, particularly the warm tones and effects char-
acteristic of Pictorialism. The subject matter of
their early work was often from museums visited
or architecture seen while traveling. But the Starns
did not try to make their photographs look like
icons from the history of painting. Rather, they
photographed this iconic material strictly for their
own purposes to open up their concept of what
photography can be. The Starns’ work added a
twist to the ongoing debate of photography’s status
as a fine-arts medium because of its sculptural
qualities achieved through montaging photographs
and creating irregularly shaped works.
The Starns were the focus of considerable dis-
cussion since first emerging primarily within the
context of contemporary art rather than the pho-
tography world. Some were enthusiastic about the
Starns’ work, while others were skeptical about the
Starns’ quick ascent in the art world or the roman-
tic nature of their work. Others applauded their
dismissal of many conventions of photography,
particularly the fact that they created visually
lush, one-of-a-kind works on a par with paintings,
or were intrigued by the idea of their collaborative
processs. Andy Grundberg, the author of the book
Mike and Doug Starn, also describes their work as a
‘‘paradox,’’ on the one hand emphasizing its unique-
ness and ‘‘aura,’’ while on the other being based on
the technology of photography as a mechanical pro-
cess that produces no originals.
In 1989, the Starns moved their studio from
Boston to Brooklyn, where they currently reside.
There they began a series on transparent, polyester
film put under stress from bent wood and pipe
clamps in an effort to add conceptual and physical
tension to the work. One representative work from
this series, ‘‘X,’’ 1989–1990, is a self-portrait of the
Starns, where transparent images of the brothers’
faces overlap and are bowed to the breaking point
by the pipe clamps.
Following the success of their 1990–1991 survey,
the Starns’ work began to change, shifting focus as
they began to explore one of the essential elements
of photography, light, and its source, the sun, the
results of which are theSun Works. The first of the
Sun Works were theSpectroheliographs, a series
that included recurrent images of a young woman
by the fifteenth-century painter Petrus Christus
and images of the sun taken by NASA. One of
this series,Ameratsu, 1994, a suspended, kinetic,
photographic sculpture over ten feet in diameter,
is lit from within by golden light and exhibited
along with a video that shows its making.
The next year, Doug and Mike exhibited the
second series ofSun Works, theHelio Libriseries
(1992–1995). This series questioned the truth of
scientific theories about the universe and the waySTARN, DOUG AND MIKE