Masters & Pelavin is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of photographs by American artist, Steven Katzman. The show pulls from a number of the artist’s past series, spanning the last two decades, and integrates themes of love, death, religion, afterlife and faith. This will be the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery and in NYC.

Steven Katzman is a self-taught photographer who has combined, over the years, his long-time interest in political science with his professional photographic journey. His work combines the conceptual “straight” photographic style of Andres Serrano; the grotesque, yet, beautiful “staged” photographic style of Joel-Peter Witken and the intimate “street” photographic style of Diane Arbus.

Katzman’s photographs are carefully thought-out, almost meditative in their quiet stillness, regardless of the actual circumstances of their making. Like his forerunners, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hines, and Dorthea Lange, Katzman presents matter-of-fact images of his subjects. However, his work goes beyond the parameters of photo-journalism. His earliest documentations present subtleties in his subjects that are ultimately political. In later series, the artist manipulates his subject matter in order to create social or cultural metaphors. His most recent body of work captures the humanity of his subjects through their uncensored emotional expression. Katzman’s photographs can sometimes be particularly difficult, even disturbing, to view and there is a strong vein of the sociopolitical running through his entire body of work—an urge to investigate, to understand, to reveal the outcasts and edges of mainstream society.

This is especially true of the photographs that have been selected for the Masters & Pelavin exhibition, which are remarkable for the way they manage to convey intimacy, despite the challenging subject matter shown. “Flowers for Gretchen” depicts a dissected human skull—a specimen from the archive of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia—filled with dried flowers taken, without permission, from the office of the Museum’s director. The photograph remained untitled, until years later when Katzman stumbled upon the Director’s obituary, and was surprised that his name and this image were mentioned, forever linking himself and the director, Gretchen, together in life as well as in death.

Moving chronologically with Katzman’s career, the exhibition follows the artist as he approaches the subject of Death more directly through documentations of the human cremation process. The artist spent nearly two years working on this specific body of work, repeatedly recording the cremation process from beginning to end. Typical of Katzman’s imagery, the viewer is presented with exactly what was on the other side of his lens—the crematorium’s oven door open, flames engulfing a corpse, licking the flesh off it’s bones. The concentrated energy found within the subject is counterbalanced by the beautiful craftsmanship found in all of Katzman’s prints.

The exhibition continues to develop with the same pace as Katzman’s career—pulling works from the artist’s most controversial series to date, documentations of body’s found in morgues, which are staged in varying religious context. This transitional series of work draws from the artist’s earlier staged photographs and express the artist’s own emotional journey as he allows himself to question an afterlife for the first time. “Child,” the most heartbreaking and powerful image in the series, depicts the body of an autopsied child, angelically posed with the wings of a dead bird atop a burnt wooden crucifix. Rich in layers of contradicting cultural and sociological associations, the photograph is able to transcend sensationalism and become an ethereal icon created through the artist’s poetic imagination.

As Katzman continues his emotional exploration into spiritualism and the afterlife, so does the exhibit. The previous depictions of death and loss are juxtaposed with reproductions from the artist first book, “The Face of Forgiveness: Salvation and Redemption,” published by powerHouse Books, spring, 2005. These images depict groups of evangelical Christians captured in the throes of religious ecstasy, openly weeping, in uncontrollable fits of “holy laughter” or overcome by the spirit and struck to the ground. The bodies of his subjects—from the strong and muscular to the overweight, crippled or injured—are twisted and full of torment. These photos are as striking and powerful as anything brought back from a Voudun ceremony in Haiti or a primitivist church in Sicily. Yet, they make no pretense of the documentarian’s ethnological distance; they’re snapped in the midst of the action and convey a raw, uncensored passion. This series shows that the transformation from a faithless life to a more devout one is anything but easy.