Curator & Producer
ONE SHOT ONLY: The Instant Photographs of Jean Andre Antoine, The Brooklyn Bank Community Center, 2019
Street photographer Jean-Andre Antoine bridges concepts that are seemingly at odds with one another - vintage cameras and contemporary subjects, both street vendor and fine artist, and access to today’s “unlimited content” with a finite supply of discontinued film. Antoine devoted himself to the art of Polaroid street photography under the mentorship of downtown polaroid photographer Louis Mendes with a burgeoning motivation to carry on the legacy of a disappearing art form. He positioned himself on the corner of Prince and Broadway in SoHo, now “his office”, to capture portraits of passersby as a means of daily income and to expand his collection of work.
For the past several years, Antoine garnered attention on social media for featuring subjects holding up their polaroid portrait, creating “a photo within a photo” effect. However, Antoine’s archives tell a story of a street photographer not confined by his daily work in SoHo, but rather a vast sensibility of capturing the unique character of New York City. In his first solo exhibition taking place at the Brooklyn Bank Community Center, he invites spectators to meet him in different places like further downtown, his local bodega or home with family in Bed Stuy. ONE SHOT ONLY features fifteen black-and-white instant photographs placed over large archival replicas of the same image. Experimenting with mixed media and scale for the first time, Antoine places original photographs atop the focal point of larger prints as a conceptual framing device subverting the idea of mass production, replicas, digitization, social media and technology, and directing the viewer's focus to the original photograph that thrives within boundaries.
Each photograph seems to carry a story from the moment it entered materiality - the faded film, erosion, and marks on the photographs point to the expiration of the film or to the moments he traveled around the city with them, at times taping them to the wall of the former Dean & Deluca at Prince and Broadway. ONE SHOT ONLY explores the sense of timelessness Jean-Andre Antoine achieves through his process of capturing contemporary subjects in an analog medium.