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INTERVIEWS (audio and print)

Excerpts:

SECURITY
MEETINGS
NUCLEAR WEAPONS (FACE TO FACE WITH THE BOMB)


SECURITY

First responders never looked so much like action hereos as in these images by Paul Shambroom.... The images, on view at Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea, were inspired by the grand portraiture of the 18th and 19th centuries: subjects painted against stylized landscapes, in light at odds with the setting.
New York Times, "That Chemical Fire Matches Your Hazmat", Gefter, Philip, April 16, 2006.

Shambroom's exploration of our security apparatus is one of the smartest artist responses to 9/11. Like Inka Essenhigh, Lari Pittman or Shirin Neshat, Shambroom hasn't made art about the attacks themselves, but about the climate that those attacks created (or enabled).
Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green's blog, "Acquisition: Shambroom at Walker", May 23, 2007

The peculiar stillness of Shambroom’s photographs casts these scenes as a series of curious tableaux or intricately staged happenings…. (he) punctuates these scenes with a series of portraits of America’s ‘first-responders’ – the heroic characters willing to risk their lives in the event of attack. Yet, in the strange detachment of these figures from their backdrops, and the performative connotations of the photographs’ art historical allusions (think Gainsborough, Reynolds or Camille Silvy), we sense something unsettlingly theatrical in their chivalrous self-imaging. In extraordinary costumes, their heroic postures resemble the valiant stances adopted by the ‘good guys’ of popular culture- part GI Joe, part Buck Rodgers, with a touch of Marvel comic superhero. Once again, we are met by the unreal.
Photoworks (Brighton, UK), “Paul Shambroom: Security”, Autumn/Winter 2006/7,  Burbridge, Benedict.

In his latest series, "Security", (Shambroom) presents a series of John Singer Sargent-meets-John Ashcroft portraits of Emergency Workers, SWAT teams, bomb squad members, search-and-rescue professionals, and hazardous-material-response teams... Shambroom's picture depict the convergence of capitalism, citizenship, and paranoia. They seem to say "Welcome to Donald Rumsfeld's war machine." He has the eagle eye and levelheaded skill to bring this message to the forefront, even if he's misguidedly printing these otherwise gripping pictures on canvas.
Village Voice, "Welcome to Donald Rumsfeld's war machine", Saltz, Jerry, April 7, 2006.

His straightforward approach enhances the strangeness of such images as a SWAT team storming a ranch-style house, men in hazmat suits spraying chemical foam over a prosaic sedan, and a gigantic Donald Duck head, grinning malevolently in an abandoned playground as if it were the last remnant of a vanished civilization.... Shambroom has also created nearly life-size portraits that draw on 18th century conventions for their heroic poses, and that are printed on canvas and varnished. His portrait of a Minnesota Air National Guardsman wearing an armored suit in an autumnal birch forest with a bomb-sensing robot is particularly surreal. The scene's bucolic innocence poignantly undercuts the action-figure heroism... The peculiar achievement of the "Security" series lies in Shambroom's studiously neutral approach. Shot without apparent irony or editorializing, the images present our first responders as ordinary human beings even while showing them in dramatic situations.
ArtNews, "Weinstein: Paul Shambroom", Abbe, Mary, Jan. 2007.


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MEETINGS

Meetings is a delight, a 128-page photographic monograph that ekes interest out of one of the most tedious activities known to humankind – the meeting. Photographer Paul Shambroom attended hundreds of council meetings in dozens of American towns and suburbs, capturing small-scale democracy in action, and turning impassioned debates about X and Y into Renaissance-style tableaux., rich with colour and drama. Lovers of minutiae should be sure to check the endpapers, where each featured gathering is neatly and comprehensively minuted.
Wallpaper Design Awards 2004 ‘Best Books’, January 2005.

Paul Shambroom’s highly original book about small town meetings in the US is a classic. Beautifully produced, with different paper for the minutes of the actual meetings. Detail and rigour is what this is all about.
Photographers’ Gallery “Bookshop Selection: Martin Parr”, Parr, Martin, 2005

It would have been easy for a photographer to satirize, or even ridicule these people in their sometimes curious clothes and often shabby surroundings. Instead, Paul Shambroom confers on them the human nobility of democracy. This collection adds up to a core-sample of self-government, a modern-day archeology of Democracy. He recognizes that theses characters are ourselves, that their intentions are ours. It adds up to a searingly honest photographic fanfare for the common man.
Creative Review (London), “Reviews: Democracy in Action”, November 2004, Doyle, Stephen.

Put in the context of Shambroom's work over the last few years, Meetings is even more significant.....
The monumentality bestowed by Shambroom's formal eye describes and demystifies the power structures of our time: labor and industry, corporations, the military industrial complex, and now democracy itself. You'd be hard pressed to find an artist working with more timely or consequesntial subjects.
PDN, "In Print", November, 2004, Lehan, Joanna.

 Town council meetings are not necssarily the stuff of art, but in the work of photographer Paul Shambroom they are certainly the subject of systematic scrutiny.... In Mr. Shambroom's case, the choice of subject matter and the precision with which he renders it suggest devotion to a larger idea.... He plays with light, creating an evenness that evokes the studied artiface of neo-Classical painting.... Mr. Shambroom's approach suggests an anthropologist's method and rigor. He has created a visual catalog of the artifacts of power, but his pictures also function as narrative: part theatre, part film still, consistently hyperreal.
The New York Times, "The Tableau Inside Your Town Hall", Oct. 21, 2004, Gefter, Philip.

..these images avoid the flatness of many documentary photographs, instead glowing sensually, and every part of the image seems balanced with every other, giving each person or object equal importance. The warm humanism that celebrates such down-home individuality is rare in an art world that seems to thrive on irony.
Chicago Reader, “Paul Shambroom: Evidence of Democracy”, Nov. 28, 2003, Camper, Fred.

…Shambroom gives us a glimpse of the largely unseen machinery that quietly but persistently determines the way we live…. In Shambroom’s pictures, the simple, actual event is revealed as a marvelous and beautiful enactment of the highest democratic ideals of equality, dialogue and representation. They are pictures not just of rituals, but of the real-life practice of self and community empowerment.
ArtReview, “Democratic vistas”, October 2003, Mullin, Diane.

Like an anthropologist, Shambroom describes social space and signals cultural meanings through his artwork. …(his) work can be read as a provocative call for personal and collective change.
Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), catalog essay “Paul Shambroom: Evidence of Democracy”, September, 2003, Irvine, Karen, Associate Curator

Extraordinary size made for extraordinary photographs in recent New York show(s) of works by Paul Shambroom at Julie Saul (of American town meetings)…
New York Times, “Pictures Worth 10,000 Words, at Least” Feb. 2, 2003, Woodward, Richard.

In their large-scale format and eye-level direct address, the photos seem to approach the impressive seriousness of Salon-style history paintings. These routine conferences have been transformed into complex scenes of potent drama…. Shambroom respectfully reveals the travails of small-town democracy, exposing the toilsome and humorless process in images that nevertheless entertain us.
Art in America, “Paul Shambroom at Julie Saul”, Jan. 2003, Ostrower, Jessica.

Shambroom treats these un-newsworthy proceedings with the gravitas of David at Napoleon’s court… Suffused with artifice yet engaged with a world beyond art, Shambroom’s series presents a fresh, smart, and ironic take on the ruling class, small-town American-style.
Art on Paper, “Paul Shambroom: Meetings. Julie Saul Gallery”, Dec. 2002, Woodward, Richard B.

Shooting his subjects from an eye-level frontal position typical of documentary photography, Shambroom inserted his “Meetings” in that tradition, while nodding simultaneously to the tropes of painted civic-group portraiture. The artist’s eccentric technique underscores this unlikely marriage of Rembrandt and Walker Evans…. Teasing the latent surreality from these seemingly transparent scenes, Shambroom reminds us that reality, documentation, and especially political representation are, to varying degrees, constructed. …“Meetings” revealed a powerful critical perspective …
ArtForum, “Paul Shambroom at Julie Saul”, November, 2002, Kantor, Jordan.

….in viewing Shambroom's works, one realizes that these seemingly marginal moments are in fact loaded with consequence. ..The towns whose governments are represented in the show—none of which has a population greater than 2,500—may be negligible on a national level, but as the local cogs that turn the federal gears, their significance cannot easily be dismissed.
Time Out New York, “Art Review: Paul Shambroom, Meetings”, October 3-10, 2002, Chasin, Noah.

The photographer attends town meetings and accentuates their theatricality: in large-scale, panoramic shots in digitally enhanced color, enormous platforms dwarf the presiding locals. The endearing banality of the scenes redeems them – travel mugs of coffee, the words “hard work” stenciled on a cap, faces hung in tedium.
The New Yorker, “Talk of the Town: Photography: Paul Shambroom”, September 23, 2002.


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NUCLEAR WEAPONS (FACE TO FACE WITH THE BOMB)

It seems incredible that Shambroom was allowed to photograph these things, especially the warheads. The experience obviously terrified him, but his narrative and his endnotes about each picture testify that he has kept his wits and sharp sense of humor.
New York Times Book Review, “Books in Brief: At Home with the Bombs”, Sept. 7, 2003, Bruckner, D.J.R.

Shambroom's images embody a personal vision informed by an extraordinary eye. He combines dogged research with a subtle dread of what he is beholding, an openness to the improbable and a cool ability to snatch art from the jaws of restricted access . . . The value of Face to Face with the Bomb lies in the wealth of its data, the power and order of its images, and the timing of its release…. It is a reference work we might want to keep on hand, for what we view in its pages is not about to be phased out. And in this age of security restrictions, it's a safe bet that what Paul Shambroom has shown us will not be revealed again anytime soon.
Los Angles Times Book Review, “We live so others may die”, Aug. 3, 2003, Del Tredici, Robert.

What do what weapons of mass destruction look like? Until Paul Shambroom published the remarkable photographs gathered in his new book Face to Face with the Bomb: Nuclear Reality after the Cold War', those of us not personally connected with their manufacture, storage, and maintenance could only speculate on the basis of such antique models as 'Fat Man' and 'Little Boy,' the bombs that eradicated Hiroshima in 1945.
Boston Globe, “America’s open nuclear secrets”, June 22, 2003, Sante, Luc.

More than any study I have come across, Shambroom gives us a visceral sense of the most powerful and cruel weapons ever devised. The relevance of his extraordinarily important work is heightened in the aftermath of 9/11.
Robert Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and author of Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima

No one who looks into this book can fail to be struck by the potency of America's military might. These chilling, wonderful photographs show us how casually we take the potential for terror, and how, unexamined, it has become a power in itself. Mere human beings can hardly hope to control it.
Sandra Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Shambroom's Nuclear Weapons series stands as an important document of America in the nuclear age. Dominated by their striking formal qualities, these photographs reflect an aesthetic sensibility deeply responsive to the advent and infusion of new technologies in our daily surroundings. His images are powerful reminders of this reality with which we continue to live.
Liz Armstrong, Acting Director / Chief Curator, Orange County Museum of Art

Paul Shambroom's Face to Face with the Bomb richly deserves the much abused adjective "unique." With tenacity and chutzpah, Shambroom got OKs from the Defense Department to visit nuclear-weapons sites and to photograph what he saw. No one else has done that; and in today's hyper-tense climate, it is unlikely to happen again. Shambroom neither praises nor condemns America's nuclear deterrent. His purpose was to demystify, to reveal the unseen. Openness, he reasoned, is the American way. The result is a one-of-a-kind artifact of the Cold War.
Mike Moore, Senior Editor, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Paul Shambroom’s “Nuclear Weapons” photographs—images of soldiers climbing on and around nuclear warheads—introduced the Minneapolis artist to a national audience at the 1997 Whitney Biennial. The series, which was impressive for Shambroom’s ingenuity in gaining access to these classified spaces as for its formal rigor, toed the line between reportage and art, engaging in a kind of watchdog politicism that characterizes much contemporary photography.
ArtForum, “Paul Shambroom at Julie Saul”, November, 2002, Kantor, Jordan.

…my favorite photographer in the show (1997 Whitney Biennial) is Paul Shambroom, whose large color pictures of truly forbidden places, namely those nuclear weapons sites which he somehow obtains permission to photograph, are not only truly beautiful but also highly informative.
Art in America, “Turtle Derby (Whitney Biennial)”, June, 1997, Adams, Brooks.


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INTERVIEWS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

MONOGRAPH

  • Meetings, photographs by Paul Shambroom, 128 pages, 40 color plates, Chris Boot Publishing, London, 2004.
  • Face to Face With the Bomb: Nuclear Reality After the Cold War, photographs by Paul Shambroom, 144 pages, 83 color plates, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2003. introduction by Rhodes, Richaard, prologue and text by Shambroom, Paul.

BOOKS, COLLECTIONS, CATALOGS

REVIEWS, OTHER PRESS, INTERVIEWS