Collection: Mike and Doug Starn

Mike and Doug Starn (born 1961, Absecon, New Jersey) are American artists who have worked collaboratively since the early 1980s. Their practice is rooted in photography but consistently exceeds its conventional boundaries: the Starns fold, clamp, tape, layer and construct photographic materials into three-dimensional assemblages that foreground the physical properties of the medium — its surface, support, fragility and capacity to be handled.

Their breakthrough came in the mid-1980s with large-scale works made from toned ortho film combined with steel, silicon and other structural materials. Works such as Fear of Influence, Sun and the Vaporum series treat the photograph as an object to be built rather than simply printed, collapsing the distinction between image and sculpture. A major travelling museum survey in 1990–91 consolidated their international reputation, and in 1992 they received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Fine Art Photography.

Their 1992 exhibition at The Power Plant, Toronto — Regeneration, curated by Richard Rhodes alongside Hannah Collins — placed their assembled photographic structures in dialogue with Collins’s monumental wall-based sequences, examining the material and physical dimensions of photographic practice. The Starns have exhibited widely at institutions across North America and Europe, and their work is held in major public collections internationally.