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2008 EDITION

July 8th - September 14th

Marla Rutherford - Fetish Coffee, model: Alejandra, Pasadena, California, 2004


Marla Rutherford

SUBMIT

Marla Rutherford’s work references many genres of photography – fashion, advertising, glamour portrait, fetish, film stills, Pirelli calendars – to present highly original fictional and performative portraits that play off incongruous worlds, often interrupting a domestic scene with a fantasy image or placing a seductive fetish portrait in a commonplace, everyday scene.

Marla Rutherford’s photographs show a surreal universe that brings together groups of people from completely different worlds. The originality of her work resides in the juxtaposition of images of children or the elderly with portraits of people from the worlds of sadomasochism and fetishism. By making the latter group pose in ordinary surroundings, the photographer brings the strange and the banal together, and so allows viewers to feel more at ease when faced with people whose practices are seen as deviant. In her collection of brightly coloured images, Rutherford uses a style close to advertising photography, which is intended to seduce the viewer. Portraits of people from a community that is a part of the counterculture of America are brought out into the light of day and treated as a subject as commonplace as a smiling baby or an old lady sitting in her living room.


Nathalie Herschdorfer, in ‘reGeneration: 50 photographers of tomorrow, 2005-2025’, Thames & Hudson Editions.


www.marlarutherford.com

She is represented by Irvine Contemporary gallery, Washington.

Marla Rutherford

Born in 1978 in Colorado, United States. Lives and works in Los Angeles.


Marla Rutherford studied psychology at Boston University (BA, 2000) and photography at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California (BFA, 2005). A fashion, editorial, and advertising photographer is represented for the East coast of the United States by Irvine Contemporary. Her work has been published in PHOTO Magazine (French), Photo District News, LA Weekly, The New Yorker, and Forbes, among other publications. Rutherford's work has been included in numerous shows such as reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow, which was organized by Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and opened in the United States at Aperture Gallery, New York.