About John Dessarzin

JOHN DESSARZIN, M.A.

MASTER PHOTOGRAPHER

OF ICONIC, IMMINENT MYSTERY

Decades of photographic observations leads you deeply into and beyond Dessarzin’s technical dedication to the art and craft of producing inspired pictures. A lifetime of worldwide travel, professional work, and his background years of apprenticeship and formal, graduate studies in Switzerland, qualify his mastery of the tools and techniques of modern picture taking. Thus, he embraces a lifetime of imaginative styles and iconic subject matter. However, Dessarzin’s art reaches far beyond the pleasure of simple visual gratification. By perfecting dramatic contrasts, for example, his images can show you a modern female figure at first glance vividly portrayed in the full splendor of color photography, involving you in the plenitude of her erotic beauty. His timeless pictures celebrate the humanity and pulchritude of glamour idols such the iconic film star, Sophia Loren. Dessarzin and his camera also bear witness to iconoclastic economic, political and social disasters of modern revolution in Cuba; the tragedy of Chernobyl in the ex-Soviet Union; and far broader, globalizing dynamics in the both Eastern and Western world.

Photographing struggling people with anonymous lives, Dessarzin’s mastery of black-and-white techniques present realistic human subject matter at work, at prayer and at play. Here is where this master photographer processes surrounding shadow and intensifies the moment -- capturing, almost imprisoning the lone, soulful, female figure in serpentine shades that fade into the anthropological horror of ancient human sacrifice. For example, the shadows and stones of Mayan blood-letting statues; their staircase of sanguine religious practice; the pomp of ceremonial wear preserved in antediluvian murals come alive once again immortalized, but still suggesting an imminent deathly specter haunting modern civilization in wastelands of modern wars. When Dessarzin captures the young, seductive, human face of a pubescent in half-shadow, he is suggesting the eternal, deathly and brutal dealing to the exotic face of a village girl; and, a simultaneous, mysterious, but funereal bouquet that clings to every human – all too human! -- physical body.

Scenting his visual imagination with the perfume of flowers, human skin and sex, the master photographer and videographer continues to allure human transcendental beauty and bounty with the powerful presence of shadow. At times, he pictures the ineffable splendor in modern architecture as a haunting, commercial phantom among the iconic, storied skyscrapers of profit. In other instances, he presents ancient stone singularities as a charismatic existence that amply forges, but also devours human character in shades of ambivalence suggesting confused or decadent aspects of civilization. Driven artistically, this master photographer presses onward into understanding the humanizing transcendental experience where the imminent feeling of closeness to the divine force inherent in all life describes the photographic moment -- that instant visual opening into the mind of God existing in, and extending into all parts of the dynamically created universe. Discovering Dessarzin himself in this divine milieu of creativity, the mystery and the mastery of his art partakes of the imminent secret of all living things.

Therefore, Dessarzin dedicates his photographic labor in daily offering of his own ever-present artistic drive to the mysterious, demanding but sublime creative force dwelling in and transcending all humanity. Desiring to inspire others, this contemporary master shares his photographic art via contemporary international exhibitions and numerous hard-cover, full color books and magazine publications featuring his creative work.