Label Text:
In I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, Times Square, New York City, the titles of the movie and accompanying featurette, together with the partial tagline “Unearthly Thing!,” offer potential descriptors for a young man. In the advertised movie, Dr. Frankenstein creates a homicidal monstrosity out of teenager’s body parts. Despite the similarity in the way text and figures interact in this photograph and in Louis Faurer’s photographs of the cinema, Paulin’s embodies his characteristically good-humored vision. Horror films of the 1950s, inherently over-the-top productions with low-tech effects that often amuse today’s viewers, stand apart from the serious film noir of the 1940s. By throwing the face of this man into deep shadow, Paulin exaggerates the sense of foreboding to the point of humorousness. If Faurer’s pictures imply that anyone can be a monster, Paulin’s photograph suggests that monsters are only in the movies.
MD, PHOTOdocument exhibition, March 30, 2012-July 22, 2012
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2010.20 |
