Robert Stivers: Listening to Cement

Robert Stivers has quickly emerged as one of the foremost contemporary photographers. In this, his second book of photographs in three years, Stivers extends, deepends, & complicates the themes of mystery & movement, sensuality & spirituality, & the search for individual identity that occupied him in his first book, Robert Stivers: Photographs, (1997). In his new work, he juxtaposes the human figure with architectural images, thus pointing to the reciprocity between consciousness & a sense of place that is central to an understanding of the self. The aesthetic throughout couples out of focus images with rich & subtle textures & tones. The effect is a collection of breathtaking images that are wonderfully coherent & at once haunting & mysterious, deeply spiritual, & perfectly choreographed. Figures dance around & through columns & curves of stone. In Stivers' vision, nothing is ever static; there is constant movement & continual flux, not only of the self, but also of time & place. He seems to suggest that the quest for identity resides in a void of disorientation, but a void that can be redeemed by the wonderment & mystery of an unseen spiritual world. At the turn of the millennium, these images offer an antidote to the loss of faith in a postmodern world & an alternative to the over-rehearsed axiom that God is dead & there is no autonomous self. It is an extraordinary accomplishment.Stivers, Robert is the author of 'Robert Stivers: Listening to Cement' with ISBN 9781892041333 and ISBN 1892041332.