JOSEPH MAIDA | Joseph Maida

Born Free, Born Equal

Joseph Maida’s photographic collage series, “Born Free, Born Equal,” reconstructs Ansel Adams’ 1944 MoMA exhibition catalog by layering Adams' vintage negatives and prints onto the catalog pages while obscuring specific faces, names, ethnicities, and dates. This work illuminates the past's timely relationship to the present and punctuates the far-seeing power of Adams' documents as they intersect with issues of equality, social justice, and photography’s impact in the 21st century.

Maida's overlays and interventions onto the catalog's original sequence amplify the prophetic nature of this historic story. It is both a sensitive reanimation of a still-resonant chapter in American history and a hard-hitting meditation upon photography’s complicity with its outplaying. — CHARLOTTE COTTON

www.bornfreebornequal.com
Things “R” Queer

Things "R" Queer ushers in new cycles of art and food photography by embracing one of the latest iterations of visual culture, Instagram, as its initial platform for circulation. Taking the trope of food porn on social media as his prompt, Maida crafts subversive tableaux with purposeful doses of Pop Art humor, advertising gloss, and Japanese kawaii and then photographs his colorful sculptures in a matter-of-fact, documentary-style. His images, which are historically “straight” in their aesthetics and lack of manipulation, are undoubtedly queer in their campy visualization of a fantasy-cum-critique of contemporary material culture. This project punctuates Aperture's newly published history of Food Photography Feast for the Eyes, edited by Susan Bright, and has been published as a 24 postcard set by CONVOKE which you can purchase at bookshops in North America and Europe as well as here.
Dream Factory

Dream Factory / 夢ファクトリー (2007-2012) is a visual exploration of the promises and shortcomings of postwar Japan as it reflects and reinterprets the American Dream. This projects highlights the complexities of this island nation, which enjoyed the benefits of subscribing to American ideologies since the 1950's, as it is now eclipsed by China's economic might. A documentation of Japan's contemporary material culture, Dream Factory magnifies the dazzling surface and complicated underbelly of the broader capitalist world.
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New Natives

New Natives are a group of portraits of aspiring male models of mixed ethnicity and race from Hawaii. The subjects are scouted from New York through social media and photographed in their local terrain around the metropolis of Honolulu. Drawing from Hawaii’s royal history as well as its Eastern and Western influences, this series introduces visions of masculinity, identity, and sexuality, which upend conventional hegemony on multiple registers. New Natives is available as a limited edition monograph published by L'Artiere here.
Ben

Ben (2011-2000) presents a solitary figure playing dress-up in his hermetic world of narcissism, posturing, and mirrors. Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s Springs Awakening and Jean Baudrillard’s Ecstasy of Communication, this series casts the viewer as a privileged voyeur, who witnesses the flowering of Ben's adulthood desire and his changing relationship to the domestic spaces of his adolescence.
Interior Portraits

Interior Portraits (1999-2008) depicts fellow artists at homes to investigate how they define themselves, and are defined, by the places they inhabit, the clothes they wear, the rituals they perform, and the objects that surround them. These pictures highlight everyday desires, both primal and prescribed, and consider what individuals long for after they have acted on, and fulfilled, their habituated wishes.
Isaac

Isaac (2003-present) is an ongoing series of portraits about time, place, perception, and desire. Unlike Georgia (Alfred Stiegitz), Eleanor (Harry Callahan), Edith (Emmet Gowin), and Maria (Lee Friedlander), Isaac, a man, is the subject of this photographic series. This project channels a broader history of the figure in art by confronting the photographic paradigm of woman as muse over the last century.
Nan

Nan (1995-2007) is a visual diary of the golden years of Maida’s maternal grandmother. Born Annunziata in 1920 -- but known by her Americanized name, Nancy -- Nan, who was raised to be a 1950's homemaker, embodies the complexities and contradictions of the postwar America woman. Inspired by Sirkian melodramas, this series relishes in the veneer of American prosperity while illuminating the underbelly of growing old in a culture of youth, beauty, and consumption.
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Local Service

Local Service (1999 - present) documents small, independent companies and mom-and-pop shops across the United States in the age of big-box stores, online retail, and billion-dollar corporations.