Candace Doyal has created a body of work that gets to the heart of her subjects. Melding documentary, staged, street, and fine art photography, Doyal gives a behind-the-scenes look at off-beat people and abandoned spaces. With echoes of Nan Goldin, it’s clear Doyal understands and relates to these people and places through the intimate details conveyed. She is not an observer photographing from a safe distance, but an unseen yet felt presence, just out of the frame. Her book, Thin Coffee and Secondhand Smoke, a painstaking re-creation of scenes from her family's searing history of addiction and incarceration, was published by Chatwin Books in 2023.
David Lynch traveled west, fire-suit-in-hand, looking for opportunities. Mythic landscapes offered the perfect venue for his vision. “He creates figures whose interior lives are still veiled in costume, but whose interface with the world becomes a highly visible comedy, tragedy, or farce.” Part costume, part metaphor, the fire suit could be a protective suit of armor against the vagaries of Mad Max gun-toting renegades and/or political machinations.
Like the artist himself, the figure he has conjured up can be both comedic and intensely, introspectively serious. . . Into the middle of this Western landscape is dropped an enigmatic and hyperbolic figure. In place of the Marlboro Man, we have an even more remote, even more rugged, untouchable loner, roaming vistas even more windswept than the . . . archetypal, cow-punching version of American manhood. –Annie Brulé, Strangers in the Landscape, Chatwin Books, 2015
To purchase any of these pieces, please contact Chatwin Arts directly at info@chatwinarts.com, and we would be happy to help you.
