ICONS / ICONOCLASTS

By Wayne Schoenfeld
Sponsored by HP in connection with an exhibition at Cirque Du Soleil International Headquarters, Montreal, Quebec.
Oct. – Nov. 2007 40pp.
Paperbound 978-0-9798631-4-1
$30.00 (pub date Oct. 24, 2007)

Working on an epic scale in the tableaux vivant genre of photography, Wayne Schoenfeld recreates the drama and pathos of the circuses of a bygone era with real circus performers and live animals. Honored with a one-man exhibition of his circus photographs at Cirque du Soleil International Headquarters in Montreal in October, 2007, Schoenfeld’s mesmerizing work is collected in this book, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, with an introduction by noted art critic Peter Frank.

“Wayne Schoenfeld does not simply play upon our almost-atavistic recollection of the circus; he answers it, he fills it, he charges it alternately with the power of hallucination and the power of shared memory. There is something gloriously perfect about Schoenfeld’s restagings before the camera. He lets us “remember” the circus both as we attended it (or seem to recall attending it) and as we saw it in the popular imagination, peeking behind the tents and in the dressing rooms at the sad and giddy lives of those who actually ran off and joined the circus, or conversely were born to the manner and could conceive of doing nothing else.”

From the Introduction by Peter Frank.