Lucas Blalock

Lucas Blalock was born in 1978 and works in the United States. He participated in MoMA’s Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 and was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Since xyz at Ramiken Crucible in 2011, he has shown widely in galleries and museums.^*3

Blalock’s themes include the constructed nature of photographs, software as visible drawing tool, still life after digital culture, humor, awkwardness, and the circulation and reuse of images. He photographs ordinary objects such as erasers, cloth, glasses, strawberries, shoes, and bags with a large-format camera, then manipulates them in Photoshop while refusing to hide the edits. Duplication, layering, erasure, and redrawing are deliberately awkward and visible, so the image discloses its digital making.^*2 Blalock uses digital tools not to complete the photograph seamlessly but to make the labor of alteration visible. This responds critically to the expectation that software should vanish into realism. His work belongs to a post-2000 context of smartphones, screens, software, online circulation, and the new visual literacy of swiping, pinching, and retouching. It matters because it makes digital manipulation an obvious, comic, and critical part of photographic seeing rather than a hidden flaw or production secret.^*5

Aperture places Blalock with artists such as Michele Abeles and Margaret Lee, noting their knowledge of photographic tradition and sensitivity to image circulation and the collapse between object and image. MoMA’s Inside/Out text emphasizes his deliberately obvious or awkward edits as a challenge to ideas of photographic purity. The humor of his work opens onto a deeper claim: all photographs are constructed, and digital culture has made that construction newly visible.^*2