Shana Nys Dambrot
Johnny Cubert White is a creative of many mediums, more than a few alter egos, and an uncommonly sensitive and instinctive artist who, when his street photography practice was interrupted by his camera losing a battle with gravity that resulted in serious injury to the machine, rolled with it.
The #MyBrokenCamera series born of this violent synchronicity soon yielded some rather astonishing visual results — prismatic halos, heat-seeking anatomy, ambiguous architecture, and an overall sense of emotionally charged eccentricity — and spawned more than a few #MBC subseries. Night Stalkers follows on White’s outdoor urban walks project, capturing the spectral figures that evoke Hollywood Noir in the fringes of the DTLA Arts District, which you can follow at #MBCNightstalkers. Dopplegänger courts the double-exposure presence of two figures in a frame — often in fact a single figure and their shadow-self, #MBCDoppleganger.
And speaking of the shadow self, the acclaimed debut of curated works from the My Broken Camera series had a proper outing in 2017 during the Venice Biennale with the Selfie Portraits — works which both elevated and subverted the ubiquitous social media ritual. Jean Blanc’s Bon Vivants a collection of portraits of the vivacious people in Johnny’s world, which you can follow at #MBCJBBV. And for his next show, he plans to hone in on the edgy bohemian after-hours of that world, with the Fuck Me Fuck You series using his broken camera to document and infuse mystery into images taken during actual sexual encounters, #MBCFuckMeFuckYou.
Of all the series, the selfies and the sex games are strangely the most compelling. All the works share the same dynamic range of unpredictable yet consistently magical visual qualities, like the metallic auras, shifting focal planes, luminous bodies, and hovering, shadowy beings that animate and complicate the frames. In terms of the selfies, this fracturing evokes a kind of psychological realm of metaphor for the various fragments of a single persona, or the energies that lie below the surface, or behind the masks.
In the case of the sex series, the broken camera effect infuses what could otherwise be simply witty and well-composed pornography with all those aesthetic and cognitive distinctions, but at the same time is a kind of a send-up of the “explicit” directive of porno and erotica — you have to look incredibly closely to decipher the images and the scenario. The painterly obfuscations of the process deprioritizes the erotic content, taking the work to an unexpectedly nuanced, ambiguous place full of humor and artistic bravado.
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