Fractured

Jeremy Kost's (born 1977) last monograph, It's Always Darkest before Dawn, established him as a master of the Polaroid. His body of work is at once image, performative act and genre-bending fusion of subject, environment and artistic technique. Born of one of the fortuitous mistakes in the artist's studio that leads to incredible breakthroughs--a camera malfunction-- Kost's latest series consists of multiple-exposure Polaroids of young, stereotypically beautiful men--a subject and technique that Kost has been investigating for nearly a decade. These mesmerizing, layered Polaroid images are collected in Fractured, along with contextualizing and descriptive text from Franklin Sirmans, LACMA Curator of Contemporary Art. Made throughout 2013, only a fraction of the work has been seen outside of the studio before the publication of this book. Presenting dreamlike, fractured narratives collapsed into a single Polaroid frame, each image takes the viewer to an intimate place filled with broken dreams and unrequited desire, while celebrating man's beauty and identity. Whether cropped to show luminous details or simply floated on the page, each photograph represents a tangible, beautiful moment layered in mystery.