Originating from Los Angeles, Brooklyn-based queer photographer Shaun Lucas captures the banalities and taboos in American Culture. His uncanny portraiture pays tribute to his former pageant Mother, who encouraged his need for “artistic” expression. Due to his appetite for vanity and leisure, he explores the various quintessential social groups embodied in America. He documents suburban and urban lifestyles that portray many facets of life, ranging from interpersonal relationships to deeply rooted subcultures. Attracted to society’s construction of land, Lucas exposes the deception in subdivisions and human-made environments. While exploring different social groups, he captures American ideologies such as gun culture, motifs, politics, and consumerism. Focused primarily within the LGBTQIA+ community, he glorifies the diverse group of individuals he calls friends and extended family. Interested in the disgusting, the pleasurable, and the horrific, he explores the brutalist existence of life and the natural world. An anthropologist at heart, Lucas turns his camera to document the smaller nuances beneath our feet. The work encapsulates a sense of euphoria and melancholy while depicting cobwebs, mushrooms, insects, and flowers. Shaun prefers to travel and lounge out in the sun when not shooting with his medium format camera.
BFA Photography - School of Visual Arts 2015