David Brandon Geeting

Photographer David Brandon Geeting doesn’t play by the rules. Throughout his career, Geeting has developed an immediately identifiable visual language that ignores reason or convention, built upon having fun, being inventive, and challenging photographic norms.

The work in Amusement Park is a visual playground with an abundance of visual spectacles, playful juxtapositions and colorful manic energy that bursts with lyricism. The project is produced with hybrids of genres, from still-life to portraiture, studio invention and documentary storytelling, each of which blur the boundaries of what’s expected from any of their singular traditions.

While many photographic conversations lead to asking the photographer, ‘why?’, Geeting asks, ‘why not?’ His work is bred from unconstrained and impulsive curiosity. “I let the art outsmart me,” says Geeting. “Sometimes I’ll have an idea involving a few objects that might work together in the same frame, but I almost never know what that frame will look like.” Whether photographing in the studio or outside, his work is a product of discovery, rather than pre-determination, and is predicated on the seeking of what he, and in turn the viewer, has never seen before. “If I’m not surprised by what I’m making,” he says, “how can I expect my audience to be surprised?”

What results from Geeting’s surprises are pictures that are loud, spontaneous, and charismatic. The notion of an amusement park, as Geeting suggests, “has always been an onslaught of colors, noises, whizzing imagery, and total mayhem. It’s like a collage of sensory overload.” Geeting’s work elevates the spectacle to an art form and taps into a primal element of our contemporary visual experience.