Clive Barker masters another creative medium… Photography

Visionary. Fantasist. Author. Poet. Painter. Photographer. No one word is adequate to describe Clive Barker, who for more than twenty-five years has expanded the reaches of human imagination as a novelist, director, screenwriter, dramatist and artist.

An inveterate seeker, Barker traverses between styles with ease, from lucid dreamscapes to visceral horror to existential drama to pan-sexual erotica. Barker also has a hand in a range of projects that reflect his grasp of the creative potential in contemporary media. Some arise from his own literary terrain; others are evolving out of his uniquely progressive production company Seraphim Films, whose most recent release, The Midnight Meat Train, garnered high praise from fans and critics alike.

Barker's photography combines narrative imagery, symbolism of ancient and modern cultures, eroticism, religious iconography, vibrant color and dramatic lighting. He demonstrates his intelligence and talent in creating work that is provocative, disturbing, erotic and titillating. Few will be able to view these images and not be stirred – some may be offended, some provoked, some stimulated and others frightened. But for those captivated few that are capable of looking deep into each image and even deeper into themselves, they will discover Barker's wicked genius, unique and original vision of man.

Barker shot 60,000 photographs for a series of books and various media all celebrating the nude male; his vision putting a fantastical edge into the images, transporting his subjects (Barker abhors the word 'model') into a world of dreamscapes and demons. The first volume is to be called Imagining Man. A large exhibition in Los Angeles, featuring hundreds of Barker's photographs, is planned for the autumn of 2009.

Four images were recently previewed at the 10th anniversary show Dirty Detroit an international erotic art exhibition last month. The photographs sold out.

ABOUT CLIVE BARKER

Barker's past achievements are as eclectic as his current slate. In 1998 he executive produced Bill Condon's God's and Monster's, which garnered three Academy Award nominations, wining the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The following year, Barker joined such illustrious authors as Gabriel Marquez, Annie Dillard and Aldous Huxley when his collection of literary works was put into the Perennial line at HarperCollins Publishers. At the same time, HarperCollins published The Essential Clive Barker, a seven hundred-page anthology of selected fiction, with an introduction by Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City).

At its core, Barker's work has always shown an unswerving commitment to spinning a good yarn. He began his odyssey in the London theatre; scripting original plays for the nomadic theatre group he founded, The Dog Company. These works include "The History of the Devil," "Frankenstein in Love" and "Crazyface," and were published in two compendiums entitled Incarnations and Forms of Heaven. They still consistently appear in productions, usually by non-profit or university companies, all over the world. [CONT]

Realizing that a career in writing highly imaginative but immensely challenging plays wasn't going to support
him, Barker turned his hand to writing intensely visual horror stories. They were published in six volumes, and their contents have provided the raw material for several immensely popular movies, including The Midnight Meat Train, Candyman, and the soon-to-be-released Dread.

In 1987, Barker took on a whole new challenge by adopting his novella The Hellbound Heart and turning it into a film he could make for a tiny sum of money. It was called Hellraiser, and it was to become a cult classic, spawning eight sequels, several lines of comic books, and an array of merchandise which elevated the demonic torturer Pinhead to a figure now recognized worldwide. It was followed in 1990 by Nightbreed, which Barker adapted and directed from his novella "Cabal." Here, in a prophetic reworking of horror's conventions, Barker turned the monsters into tragic outcasts, prefiguring the same devices later used by Tim Burton and those paid homage to his style.

But it was his debut novel, The Damnation Game – a modern reworking of the Faust myth – that really put Barker on the literary map and widened his growing international audience, bridging the gap between popular genre writing and the work of British literary figures, such as J.G. Ballard, who was, with Stephen King, an early champion of Barker's taboo-busting, sexy, yet sophisticated and electrifying prose.

As a writer, Barker persisted in defying expectation winning a new generation of fans with such best-selling fantasies as: Weaveworld, Imajica, Everville; The Thief of Always; Sacrament, and Galilee, and Coldheart Canyon. The first in his most ambitious project to date – the Abarat series – was published in October 2002, to resounding critical acclaim, and is currently published in 42 languages. A five-volume series, Abarat will eventually be a million-word journey into the fantastical with over one thousand oil paintings by the author. Next on the Abarat horizon is Abarat III: Absolute Midnight, waiting to delight readers across the world in 2010.

As much a visualist as a wordsmith, Barker frequently turns to the canvas to fuel his imagination. He has had hugely successful exhibitions across America, and his neo-expressionist paintings have been showcased in three large format books: Clive Barker, Illustrator, volumes I & II, and Visions of Heaven and Hell.

What gives Barker's work its strength bringing audiences across the world back to his alchemical cosmos over and over again is his passion: for colour, for words, for life; and his belief in the collective unconscious, its power to inspire, terrify and ultimately heal.

Contact: Angela Krass or Hannes Tamme 212 465 3251 or 323 960 5673 info@fotoprojx.com