Get to know Brian Galderisi's freakishly funny photographs

Featuring experimental set designs and costume clad models, when you first look through Brian Galderisi’s portfolio your initial instinct is to laugh. His use of humour plays upon recognisable elements, for instance a children’s halloween mask or the back of a slightly balding head, but he then pushes the identifiable quality by pairing it with something completely random.

Originally from Westchester, New York, Brian is currently in his first year at Yale School of Art studying a masters in photography. This academic environment means the photographer is fully utilising the opportunity to play around and explore the workings of a studio. Equipped with a space to work in, Brian constructs scenes using found and fabricated objects, more often than not featuring a “human figure placed within the work,” he explains. “The resulting images are not documentation of sculpture or performance, but photographs made to exist independently in that form.”

Rather than following the more traditional approach of photography and waiting for something to take an image of, Brian uses the nature of the medium to create scenarios “outside of time and to delimit the expected dimensional experience of my subject matter,” he says. As a result, Brian’s images can be as weird and wonderful as he likes, hence his deliberate use of comedy aiming to include “the full spectrum of humour,” in his images.

Alongside his use of set design and props, the photographer utilises humour to also “re-contextualise and undermine the familiar in my work,” Brian explains. The photographer even manages to do this in the slightest of details, such as using spotlighting to add a science fiction like edge to the air conditioning vent in an office building. Imaginative touches such as this overall show his ability to explore “an ever-expanding terrain for photography where I am to incite a dialogue that simultaneously brings joy and fear while questioning notions of beauty and expectations of form”.