Photograph

Black and white Kodak metallic c-print photograph of a nude woman holding a gun to her head next to a male mannequin wearing glasses and reading a Market Week newspaper. Signed, dated, and editioned in the lower right corner. Edition 5/75. Currently hung in a complimentary black frame. From an Interview with the Artist about the Work: "I think a lot times women pick the perfect man. It doesn't even matter than they don't know his first of last name. They want to live this perfect house, join the country club and whatever. They wind up living alone. Because they're not choosing people for the right reason. You have to connect with people, but we end up objectifying each other."

Born in New Orleans, Jay Rusovich is a contemporary fine art and portrait photographer and published author. He received his degrees from Tulane University and Exeter College, Oxford. After a decades long career as a freelance commercial photographer and writer representing a diverse range of clients including Saachi & Saachi, Harper Collins Publishing, Sony Entertainment, Universal Pictures, EAS Corporation, Continental Airlines, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and many more, he turned his attention to fine art. Soon, he began participating in countless exhibitions throughout the United States, both group and solo. He has lived and worked in London, New York City and Los Angeles, and currently resides in Houston, Texas. “My career started in the days of film before everyone with a cell phone was a photographer. In those days photography was a highly respected field, and just a few handful of shooters in the major metro areas were doing all of the work. No wonder we were paid so well. I travelled the world with assistants, working on a freelance basis for the widest spectrum of clients. One day it was an energy company, the next a bank. It didn’t matter. My job was to shoot on a dime and that’s what I did. Rarely was there any advance planning. I had to hit the ground running. We all got used to that. It’s how I learned. How we all learned. On my very first assignment I winged it and somehow got paid. That was my ticket forward. My validation. To this day I have never taken a single class in photography. In those days, the field was physically taxing, like manual labor, really. I’d be shooting while someone was loading film backs. That was the main reason for assistants in the field. To load backs. Polaroid test sheets would litter the floors wherever we happened to be, and chemicals were all over the place. It was messy business. And if the client needed aerials, I had to get in a chopper with a gyroscope, and, as usual, one or two assistants. There were no drones to do all of this for us. If it was a jungle, same thing, choppers and assistants crammed into these treacherous machines, some of which looked like they were far older that I was at the time. Photographers were expected to know what they were doing no matter what was asked, so like veterans of foreign wars, we learned or died trying. And speaking of dying, there were the hot zones around the world that carried State Department travel warnings. Most of the time we were flown in private jets that landed in the dead of the night, as we were taken to secure zones by French Foreign Legion soldiers carrying automatic weapons. People these days can’t fathom all of this because there is very little of it left. My industry changed radically with the advances in technology, so as digital innovations marched forward at stunning velocity, our day rates fell. I could elaborate here, but you can follow this to its logical conclusion. To wrap things up in this business, I signed some large publishing contracts and shot fitness magazines, movie posters and books until retiring from commercial work altogether in 2005. At this point forward I focused on fine art and book writing. To this day nothing has changed I’m quite happy to report.” Rusovich exhibits throughout Texas, as well as Art Basel in Miami Beach. Most recently, Mr. Rusovich was among a select few photographers chosen by a panel of international curators and art critics to appear in Erotic Signature’s latest compendium, “The World’s Greatest Erotic Art of Today,” volume 6, published in 2015. He is also a regular participant in the international recognized Dallas and Houston Art Fairs.

H 40.75 in. x W 48.25 in. x D 1.5 in.

H 32 in. x W 39 in.