2/11 Artist Lecture: Paul Shambroom

Photographer, Paul Shambroom, was born in New Jersey and currently works and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Shambroom’s series work heavily deals with power and its distribution among many aspects of life. Paul began working for a magazine and found himself very interested in the aesthetics of industrial environments. He started working with the aesthetic of chaos and clutter in these environments and focusing on the certain moments in which his camera captured. He looked to Lee Friedlander because of his use of decisive moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He started working on series where that specific moment is what charged the image and made it successful.
Shambroom’s series titled “Nuclear Weapons” was completed between 1992-2001. With this series Shambroom spoke a lot about access to certain places and how imperative it is to be well written in order to obtain permission from various places to use their space. Because he was shooting weapons that belonged to the military, the process was more difficult than others because of how tight security is with government run buildings. These images deal with the question that he asked to his audience; What makes the U.S. so powerful? Because Shambroom grew up in the height of the Cold War he was very familiar with nuclear warfare and his interest continued to grow stronger the older he became. This series he shot landscape style and paid close attention to the lighting and how it affected the look of the powerful weapons.
My favorite collection of his was the “Meetings” collection that he completed between 1999-2003. He started out photographing very important official meetings. For example, he spent a good amount of time shooting multiple congressional meetings in D.C. He realized that those meetings were not the ones that he really wanted to capture. Instead, he began traveling around the county and photographing community meetings and very intimate settings during the decision making of towns. His use of the large format camera and color negative film in this series works so well for the colors and the palette of the image. The feeling of the meeting is translated well through his use of perspective and color.
I thoroughly enjoyed Paul Shambroom’s lecture and felt that he spoke very well to us students and the faculty. He answered questions in a comical witty way that helped the lecture not become dry and mundane. He seemed to be a very interesting person and I will continue to look at his work now after listening to his process and how he carries his work out to completion.