Los Angeles-based photographer and filmmaker Chris Anthony’s photographs are fashioned from his childhood fiction-filled reading habits. He was drawn to characters from mythology, to mystery and horror stories and to poems by Edgar Allen Poe. His favorite protagonists include deities, devils and demi –gods, hobos, princes, nymphs and fishermen and the seahorse or mythical hippocampi. The title of his exhibition comes from a line in one of Poe’s poems called Dream-Land. “Seas Without a Shore reflects the woes of all those sea-faring nomads, survivors and otherwise peculiar characters marching about and standing for portraits in the ocean surf [in my photographs],” says Chris Anthony.

A series of Anthony’s photographs called “Seas Without a Shore,” is featured at the Griffin Museum at Digital Silver Imaging, 9 Brighton St., Belmont, MA, on June 16, 2015 through September 11, 2015. An opening reception will take place July 23, 2015 from 6-8 p.m.

“I was smitten with Edgar Allen Poe’s imagery,” says Anthony. “I also remember a vintage movie poster that hung on my Aunt Maggie’s living room in Stockholm from the 1934 film, The Black Cat,” he says. “The disembodied heads of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi that zoomed across a blackened vortex of a cat’s silhouette made a huge impact on me. Their facial expressions were terrifying. The poster didn’t scare me though. It thrilled me.”

Chris Anthony creates the props and costumes for the scenes in his photographs. The pieces are a combination of archival pigment prints and wet plate collodion assemblages, a process developed in the mid-19th century. He uses modern day equipment as well as antiquarian processes. The ocean backdrop is Venice Beach in California.

Born in Sweden, Anthony currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Brooklyn, Hong Kong, Washington D.C., London, Bath, San Francisco and is included in many private and public collections around the world. Publications that have featured Anthony and his work include the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Photo District News, Eyemazing, Art News, American Photo, Blink, Paper, Photo+, GUP, Fraction Magazine, Nylon, Black Book, Juxtapoz, Zoom, Angeleno, The Huffington Post, Corrierre della Serra and LA Weekly. Clients include Chiat/Day, Sony Playstation, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Republic Records, Warner Music, Los Angeles Magazine, Hollywood Records, Reprise, Stuttgart City Ballet, Myspace Records, Dell and USC.
The exhibit is open to the public Mondays through Fridays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.