chad coombs
Smile (Series)
DESCRIPTION
In his sequence SMILE (2012) Chad Coombs also concentrates on faces - food, sewing thread and other everyday things, such as bottle
openers and cigarettes serve him as eyes, noses and mouths. Fried eggs turn into eyes, cuttlefish into noses and moustaches and
open zippers smile at the viewer. This still life series lives up to its title: the photographs show not only a smile they also evoke one.
AUTHOR
Chad Coombs was born in 1982 in Saskatoon, Canada.
Coombs was interested in art already at an early age and started to paint. However, the attempted re-education of left-to right-
handedness and his onesided visual impairment (a legally blind right eye) made working in this field of art very difficult for him.
Only on discovering photography as an artistic medium did his full creative potential have the chance to develop. The camera
offers him exactly the creative meaningfulness that remained denied to him in painting.
The autodidact Chad Coombs himself appoints Richard Avedon as one of his idols and his photographic inspiration. He therefore
also seeks with his photographs to shake up and disturb the viewer, but above all he wants to encourage him to think and feel.
His work is supposed to appeal to the viewer and have an effect on him, but not to impose a particular view. Coombs is more
interested in the feelings, which are hidden behind a photograph.
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