Robert Stivers

Robert Stivers (born November 17, 1953) is an American fine-art photographer. His work is collected by museums from New York to Paris and Cologne and shown in galleries worldwide.

Known for his images and darkroom technique, The New Yorker describes his work as "Ghostly black-and-white images whose theatricality smartly complements their mystery."

Early years

Robert Stivers was born in Palo Alto, California to collegiate parents. At a very young age he moved with his family to Pasadena, California where he attended Polytechnic Private School.

Stivers attended the University of California, Irvine and received his B.A. in 1976 studying history. During his time at UC, he took a dance class at the Jimmie DeFore Dance Center and, after graduating, decided to move to New York City in the late 1970s to pursue a career as a dancer. in a role in Moses Pendleton's revival of the old Dadaist ballet, Relâche.

Following his injury, Stivers enrolled in graduate school at New York University where he studied Arts Management.

In 1987, he took a photography class, titled "Finding your Own Vision," at UCLA under the instruction of art photographer Jo Ann Callis and was inspired to pursue fine-art photography.

This body of work became known as 'Series 5' and was shown at his first solo show in New York at Yancey Richardson Gallery in 1997.

Books and later series Stivers' second book Listening to Cement was published by Arena Editions in 2000.

In 2010, Stivers came out with a series called Craving the Seamstress, in which he photographed objects he found throughout the house of his ex-wife, whom he calls a "collector of curiosities."

His sixth book, The Art of Ruin, was published by Twin Palms in the spring of 2015 with an essay by Steven Brown.

His newest book, Staging Pictures: Early Polaroids by Robert Stivers, was published by Dark Spring Press in 2017 with an essay by Robert Flynn Johnson.

Style

Trend Magazine describes Stivers' work as "darkly romantic images infused with a certain mystery that have made him one of our foremost contemporary photographers." in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Contemporary Photography

Selected books

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