Pho·tog Friday: Doug Barkey

Barkey, Doug, Self-Portrait, N.D.

Today's Pho·tog Friday post focuses on one of our own faculty members within the Photography Department, Doug Barkey! He was raised in Argentina and his photographs are heavily influenced by Latin American artists and musicians. Barkey is also interested in the cross-cultural experiences of his own upbringing and those he has encountered.

Barkey attended a bi-lingual high school in Buenos Aires and attended the University of Puerto Rico and Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. After receiving his BA in Fine Arts, Barkey began working as a photographer in St. Paul while simultaneously attending graduate school at the University of Iowa, where he received his MA in Sculpture and MFA in Photography. Barkey has had multiple solo shows around the world including at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Dominigo and galleries throughout the states of Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Virginia and New Mexico. He has also showed his work in group shots at the Museo de Arte Ateneo de Yucatan and FotoNoviembre, also in Yucatan, Mexico. Barkey currently resides with his family in Richmond, Virginia although continues to travel back and forth to South America.

Barkey's work in photography has included images shot with both film and the digital format. In the past, he has shot and created photographs that fit into many different genres: advertising, portraiture, landscapes, documentary and photo montage. Given that Barkey was already "heavy into" photograph when the digital era came about, Barkey became one of the first photographers to utilize the computer as a tool to enhance, animate and manipulate his photographs. This change from film to digital and shift with how Barkey would edit his photographs lead to one of the first digital-based art shows that was held in the Dominican Republic!

Below are images from Barkey's Yucca Series, which were displayed at the Vicrotria Price Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2009. These images are taken of plants and the landscape although Barkey's photographs display an altered sense of reality. This "altered reality" is created in camera:

Barkey, Doug, Yucca Series 1, 2009.

Barkey, Doug, Yucca Series 2, 2009.

Barkey, Doug, Yucca Series 4, 2009.

Barkey, Doug, Yucca Series 5, 2009.

Barkey, Doug, Yucca Series 7, 2009.

Barkey created a different body of work titled States of Being that were created during post with several different layers. He states, "These photographs are montaged layers of movement and still images that create a state of transition between one state of time and space and another. The two states are intertwined, merging in and out of each other" (Barkey, Fotonotes Blog).