Evan Baden

Topics: Documentary Style, Portraiture, Reproductive Processes, Series & Sequence

Evan Baden

http://www.evanbaden.com/

Anne Kelly, "Interview and Portfolios: Evan Baden," Photo-Eye Blog, April 3, 2013

http://blog.photoeye.com/2013/04/interview-and-portfolios-evan-baden.html

Evan Baden, Technically Intimate at Fotovisura

http://www.fotovisura.com/user/ebaden/view/technically-intimate

Evan Baden Interview, Visual Lab, October 31, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM1gw-47yXI

Louise Bak, "Technology and Intimacy", Toro Magazine, July 13, 2010

http://toromagazine.com/sex/sex-column/1fb9101b-4fab-5f74-6d2e-16b1e734ee55

Evan Baden, A Conversão de São Paulo

São Paulo, Brazil is a city in constant flux. The first Portuguese sailors turned the natives into instruments for their own economic purposes. The missionaries who followed converted those natives yet again, bringing Catholicism to the new world. Today, Brazil is in the midst of the traumatic evolution from a developing nation to an industrial and economic powerhouse. While this emergence has brought with it a dramatic rise of the middle class, it has been accompanied by an even more dramatic rise in income disparity. Popular culture is shifting as well, with American brands and symbols–often seen as indicators of prosperity–marking the young people that don them. The drive behind many of these changes is the movement away from Catholicism and towards one of the various types of Evangelism. A Conversão de São Paulo ties these conversions together–from the colonial past to the political, religious, economic, and cultural present–and serves as a foreshadowing of possibilities to come.

In the making of A Conversão de São Paulo, young parishioners from the Evangelic church Igreja Agua da Vida– housed in an old theatre in São Paulo–were invited to perform simplified versions of biblical stories. In addition to elements of biblical lore, symbols of prosperity, doom, and renewal were looped in to contextualize the relationship between church dogma and the contemporary changes occurring in São Paulo.

Evan Baden, Doubt.

Evan Baden, Fire.

Evan Baden, Kiss II.

Evan Baden, Milk and Honey.

Evan Baden, Paradise.

Evan Baden, Secret.

Evan Baden, The Baptist.

Evan Baden, The Conversion.

Evan Baden, The Education II.

Evan Baden, The Meal.

**Evan Baden, Under the Influence (2012-present)**

The world of American teen culture is filled with viewers. Teens are constantly inundated by imagery of iconic figures, elevated to an almost religious level. As a result of this constant bombardment, teens begin to shape their behavior to emulate what they see.

Using some of the most iconic images, figures, and tropes of pop culture as a starting point, I enlist the help of high school aged people and ask them to step into the image and embody the celebrity. The image that we create together directly communicates with the images in pop culture that teens are so used to seeing. The images in Under the Influence reinforce the stereotypes and tropes that are inherent in pop culture imagery.

By participating in the making of my images, the models are (if only for a moment) transformed into the very thing they admire and aspire to be; the very thing they have spent so much time looking at. Now, they too will be looked at. They perform for some unknown, imagined viewer. There is no concern for who that viewer is–whether they are male or female, young or old–only that they exist, and that they will be looking.

Evan Baden, It's All About Me. I Mean You. I Mean Me. (2012) 42x80".