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Bio
Joe Samberg's photography career began in 1969, when he was 21, shooting pictures on the streets of Manhattan, near Washington Square Park. In February 1970, he moved to Berkeley, California, where he started photographing the "street kids" of Telegraph Avenue, the post-hippie-era adolescent casualties washed up on the sidewalks of the Berkeley campus business district. For three years, Samberg's camera documented their world of "sex, drugs, and broken couches," culminating in his first major work, the gritty and intimate "Telegraph Avenue," shot entirely in black and white. Employing only available light, Samberg's "Telegraph Avenue" photos pulsate with life, authenticity, and emotion.
In 1975, Samberg became a staff photographer for the Oakland Museum, where he gained a mastery of interior lighting techniques. In 1984, he launched a series of fine-art still life photographs in deeply saturated colors, reminiscent of the hues, lights, and deep shadows of Dutch still life paintings. He created compositions from organic materials, including iridescent scarab beetles, dried flowers, pieces of textured paper, glass, and stone. The results were idiosyncratic, sensual, and richly layered.
In subsequent years, Samberg began incorporating live models in his studio work, placing them into carefully staged settings, thereby adding curves and flesh tones and subtleties of human emotion to the light-play and delicate textures of his earlier still-life work. Eschewing professional models, Samberg and his camera found the “message” in each subject's eyes, or posture: from erotic boldness to world weariness to vanity, vulnerability, and loneliness. The nudes marked Samberg's transition from inanimate subjects back to the unpredictable magic of the human face and form.
Over the decades, Samberg has compiled a versatile, prolific, and unflaggingly provocative body of work, in color and in black and white, in the streets and in the studio, from Manhattan, NY to Berkeley CA to Jerusalem. Today, using PhotoShop, Samberg creates lush, painterly images, adjusting and altering his photographs to create digital fine-art prints. Despite their arresting beauty, these structurally enhanced, revivified images communicate an unease similar to that of the beautiful, drug-addicted youth of "Telegraph Avenue."
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