Ben DeHaan is a photographic artist whose practice explores the subject, identity, and the body. Inspired by the queer experience and the photograph’s role in constructing reality, he uses the physical and metaphysical components that build images as subjects interrelating with the body and the landscape, questioning how we look at ourselves and our environments in relationship to the image. His work often uses experimental printing techniques involving rearrangements and distortions by hand, drawing attention to the body’s involvement within these machine oriented processes.
By interweaving the subjects into a photographic landscape, information fragments as it simultaneously built, evolving and responding to its surrounding environment. In this way, the subjects are allowed to evade immediate categorization, bringing into question the nature of static identity and presenting it rather as a complicated idea in flux.