Untitled (photofinish) 2005. 30 x 40" Inkjet print on canvas.


David Max Rothenberg lives and works in New York City. He earned a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design and is currently an MFA candidate at Bard College.

My most recent project again involves appropriation of instructional photographs, this time from books on how to train hunting dogs. In this work I explore photography as an act of containment and an attempt at order, through a surrogate relationship of dog and dog trainer. In cropping existing photographs I attempt to draw attention to what exists outside of the frame of a photograph as well as the photographer's hand in the frame itself.

LEFT: Untitled (greyhounds) 2004. 46x40" Inkjet print.
BELOW: Untitled, 2004. 44x50" Inkjet prints mounted on sintra.

As an artist who appropriates photographs, I am fascinated with the potential for turning images against themselves. My artwork begins with changing the contexts of photographic illustrations found in instructional books. I do this to assign new meanings to photographs that were created to carry an ostensibly singular instruction or objective purpose.

In my series of digital collages using photographs from dated physical health manuals, I am interested in the way the halftoned photographic images of these books indicate the visual remains of earlier eras, and how that conflicts with the books' message of bodily preservation and longevity. I undermine the instructional purpose and bodily ideals espoused by these images by incorporating them into composed scenes of fantasy, confusion, violation, contradiction and an overriding slapstick sexuality.