John Messinger
b. 1984, New York, NY
John Messinger combines elements of photography and tapestry to create large-scale, 3-dimensional mixed media artworks. His body of work consists of thousands of individual 3.25” x 4.25” instant photographs assembled together to create photographic tapestries that examine the proliferation and ubiquity of the photograph in the digital age.
Inspired by the notions of singularity and time, Messinger combines hundreds of varying images and transforms them into a single experience. His work fuses indexical and abstract imagery to question the notion of photography, photographer, and subject. On melding constructed histories into a documentary format to question the perception of truth, Messinger states, “I believe that all documentary work is on some level a self-portrait of the documentarian.”
Born in New York in 1984, Messinger earned an undergraduate degree in photojournalism and art history from Boston University and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. John Messinger has worked as a freelance photographer for The Wall Street Journal and teaches photography at the Ross School.
His works have been exhibited by the The Watermill Center (2012), McNeil Art Group (2010), and Elaine Benson Gallery (2004). His images have also appeared in the pages of The New York Times Magazine and The Boston Globe. Messinger was awarded the Aaron Siskind Memorial Scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts for a Master in Fine Arts, under the tutelage of Elinor Carucci.
John Messinger works and lives in East Hampton, New York.