Incubus’ Choice: Close-up on Adam Kozik

A few words about your work, what it expresses and about you.

Portraiture about S/M in the past has been thought of as a record of the scene, but for me it is record of the experience between the scene and myself. It is not intended to place the viewer as a voyeur, or to expose the subject but it is a departure from those themes. It’s alchemical for sure when different personalities are brought together in the same space.

S/M starts as a means to control but the energy that sustains those scenes can change and reverse. When you see a subject in a series of these pictures, they are neither iconic nor exposed instead they remain unknown. I feel the rush with S/M play is for the greater degree based on trust and discovery through another. Possibly the desire to experiment with another is the despair of not knowing oneself more.

There is a desire to link pictures of sexuality with post Mapplethorpe comparisons. I take pictures of sexuality but I don’t feel there is a connection between the two. The camera is linked to discovery, providing photographs that we in turn create the desire to link back to the past. There lies the ambiguity. While I appreciate the enchantments of the past I completely embrace the future. I stand behind the camera so I can extend myself to a reality that is unknown to me.

My intention as an artist is to prove that digital work is in no way less inferior to film, but in fact, allows more possibilities through technology to take better pictures. Photography was considered a dubious art form at best before 1980. Baudelaire said in his book Salon that photography was a medium for every would-be painter, and the results would be disastrous. The same approach as to painting compared to photography in the 1800’s has simply shifted in place of film versus digital. If the avant-garde today wants cutting edge, they can go back and look at digital photography as a mainstay in contemporary art. As a traditionalist I strive to re-create classic photography with the tools now available to an artist today.

Editor’s note: “The photographic industry [is] the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies”
Charles Baudelaire, Le public moderne et la photographie in Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris, June 10-July 20, 1859.
(translator Jonathan Mayne in Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1955)

Close-up on…