Photography (Photography)

Baby Shoes, Never Worn is part of photographer John Houck’s series of restrained still-life photographs capturing objects from his childhood. The image depicts a box, addressed to the artist’s mother, that once contained—it can be assumed—baby shoes. Houck layers the photograph with multiple exposures, lending an uneasy tripling effect to the static object.

Photography (Photography)

John Houck’s multi-layered photographic compositions immortalize nostalgic objects from the artist’s childhood, manipulated in the studio and in post-production into unreal still-life arrangements. Stamp -X, Stamp -Y consists of a careful collage of uneven scraps of paper. On their versos, these fragments of blue, white, and manila papers hold the artist’s childhood stamp collection; turned as they are, these shards of envelope become planes of colors that Houck manipulates in a vaguely grid-like fashion.