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Trajectory

Erie, Pennsilvania (USA), 1951

The son of a Honduran merchant seaman, who abandoned him soon after he was born, and an Afro-Cuban, he was raised in a Catholic Italian neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from the Art School of Brooklyn Museum, he abandoned his early inclination toward painting to concentrate the next few years on photographing street scenes and in black-and-white. During this time, he started taking drugs, which eventually drove him to give up art.

After overcoming his addiction, in 1983 he took up photography once again, this time creating elaborate scenes in which he explored his feelings toward the Catholic religion and whose dreamy atmosphere makes manifest his interest in the surrealist movement.

Characteristic of the pictures from this period are saturated colours and the accumulation of a variety of theatrical elements that toy with the spectator's associative capacity through the deployment of strategies similar to those used in the language of advertising.

In 1986, he began to explore abstraction, thereby questioning the objectivity that was traditionally considered characteristic of the photographic medium. He started to work with bodily fluids and produced images in which there is a contradiction between what is seen -surfaces of bright colour- and what, ascertaining from the titles, the spectator knows is represented: blood, milk, semen and urine. This investigation carried him into his next series, Immersions, in which, according to his own words, he proposed "to use natural fluids as being part of the essence of life and to either exploit their coloristic beauty or use their luminous effects". The work Piss Christ (1987) belongs to this period. It is an image of a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. Along with the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the ICA in Philadelphia, this piece sparked a crisis in the grant awarding system of the National Endowment for the Arts.

After the controversy, Serrano believed he could no longer remain isolated from his surroundings and he turned his lens on counterculture. Influenced by Edward Curtis, in 1990 he produced portraiture of thirty homeless people he met in parks and in the New York City subway. Taking his studio out onto the street, he restored the dignity these people are denied. In keeping with this portraiture, he produced another series, this time ironic portraits of Ku Klux Klan members, wearing their masks and their habits, hiding their identities. He was thus challenging a world he feared, as a Hispanic, yet one he longed to know about. In 1992, he initiated his project The Morgue (Cause of Death) in which his camera converted death -which the spectator assumes has resulted from a terrible situation- into images of utter beauty that recall scenes from art history.

A History of Sex (1996), the representation of sexual fantasies or of people -such as old or handicapped people- having sex, seeks the recognition of identities that are rejected as abnormal. In the year 2000, he regained his interest in dreams and, inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis, he produced The Interpretation of Dreams, where he revealed some of the taboos in contemporary society. His most recent project, America (2003), reflects on the concept of Americanism and the idea that Americans have of themselves. Although the series consists of portraiture that formally resembles his earlier work, Serrano's intention here is not to represent individualities alone but also to question the monolithic essence of a concept, that of America, which in its heterogeneity is impossible to define. S. R.