To a great degree, Dietmar Busse is a traditional photographer. He makes portraits with black-and-white film and develops his prints in a makeshift darkroom that takes up one corner of the little apartment in Curry Hill that is also his studio. Although the subjects of those portraits—including Joey Arias, Amanda Lepore, Terence Koh, AA Bronson, and other artists and performers on the downtown scene—tend to be unconventional, his approach is classic, with stylistic nods to Irving Penn and Peter Hujar. Recently, however, in an effort to free himself from “straightforward representation,” Busse has been shaking things up. Following a series of deliberately disorienting multiple-exposures, he’s turned out a terrific group of images that all but obscure the photograph under an exuberant overlay of drawing and painting.
Some of those pictures stand out in a new show called “Interface” at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art; others are reproduced here. Busse says that portraiture remains the essence of his work: “People are the basis,” he told me. “They’re all there.” But he calls the series “Flora and Fauna,” because he also thinks of its transformed subjects as “creatures, imaginary friends.” One of them is, in fact, a horse he photographed in Nendorf, the small German village where his family had a farm whose livestock still inspire him. He remembers filling his school books with sketches, and says that his new work allows him to channel his younger, freer self “at five or six, making drawings for my mother.” Working instinctively, he covered his photographs with red streamers that began as sprays of blood but gradually transformed to ribbons and flowers—a cascade of blooms. In an earlier series, Busse turned nude models into marvelous floral tributes, covering them with intricate arrays of petals and leaves. His new work comes from a similar impulse. Growing up, he said, “I’d always wanted life to be more exciting, more joyful.” Now it is.
Selections from Dietmar Busse’s “Flora and Fauna” are on view in the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art’s exhibit “Interface” through August 2nd_._
