Mitch Kern (born 1965 New York City) is an American photographer living in Canada whose work explores the relationship between the individual and society. Kern uses portrait photography as a vehicle for social commentary.
Born in New York City, he moved to Los Angeles as a teenager.[1] He has an MFA in photography from Penn State University, exhibits internationally, and is the Head of the Photography Department at the Alberta College of Art and Design.
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Portraiture is the thread that runs through his work. Since the early 90s he has produced a large body of images that explore the psychology and sociology of the human condition. Portraits produced on location dominate his early photographic output.
In the mid 90s he attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where his work took on a more personal and stylized approach. In the late 90s he began a deluge of conceptually driven studio portraits and self portraits, but his representations were not yet clearly defined until entering the graduate art program at Penn State.
Studying with photographer Ken Graves and performance artist Charles Garoian, he created his first visual metaphors of cultural identity as his work took on a more mature style, and he began enlarging his head and shoulders portraits to life size proportions. It is here that he laid down some lasting formal ground rules; a camera positioned at eye level, a softly lit subject, and a direct, symmetrical gaze.
Kern’s signature portraits, with their objective style, relaxed expressions, and seamless backgrounds, signify issues central to his thinking, a quest to understand cultural identity through the lens of postmodernism.
His work has been understood as a commentary on race, class and gender, and an exploration of the premise that human identity is a social construct, pieces of an intellectual puzzle, the result of complex social and political forces that are difficult to track and even harder to predict.
In addition to producing large scale studio and location portraits his work includes video, sculpture, and performance, and he continues to teach and speak about art in Canada, the U.S. and abroad.
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