Anthony Presley

Anthony Presley is a documentary photographer and experimental filmmaker who has exhibited across the United States and internationally in England. His recent exhibitions and film festivals include the Wasteland Film Festival in the Mojave Desert, California, Pinewood Studios in Heath, England, Flight Deck Film Festival in New York City, The Strand Theater in Pittsburgh, Rua dr Pedro de Sousa 390 in Porto, Portugal, Screaming Mad Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois, The Fear Faire Film Festival in Spring Valley Lake, California, LTV Festival in Wainscott, New York, and The University of Memphis. Anthony has been published by 121 Clicks, Design You Trust, Zartpoint, Fogateia, Fotoscapes, Sohu, Plain Magazine, ICE99, and DivianArts. To date, his work has been nominated and won 17 awards including the Experimental Edge Festival Photography Winner and Best Horror Short at Top Shorts Film Festival. 

The photography in Anthony Presley’ portfolio is quite peculiar as they appear more like film stills of staged scenes rather than works of documentary photography. He achieves such an effect through selective subject matter he finds in urban, suburban, and rural settings throughout the heartland of America, especially Memphis, Tennessee. The intense texture of his dilapidated structures and found props are intensified through manipulation of light by either light design or being illuminated by the pale moonlight or ominous lampposts. His short films on the other hand are unrelated to his photography in terms of subject and range from containing scenes of horror to displays of what appears to be ink injected onto surfaces such as water and played against ominous digitized music. 

From capturing vintage mobile trailers as well as vans, middle class homes and storefront windows, Anthony Presley’s precision, detail, and talent with light reveals a slice of Americana either frozen in time or revealing remnants of aged infrastructure still left behind across the landscape of the United States. His talent as a photographer besides capturing interesting angles of illumination would be the layout of colors selectively chosen along his composition. For example, the cold steel of a retro mobile trailer juxtaposed against bright green grass and an impeccable blue sky or a storefront window revealing mannequins like a theatrical play and surrounded by intense darkness of the night reveals Anthony’s inclinations to present middle American imagery into scenes of a grand display.

Ocean Springs (pictured above) depicts a storefront window surrounded by the cloak of twilight. The precisely manicured lawn and garden in front of the store, vintage signs, and sharpened streets as well as infrastructure reveals a well-to-do town illuminated by color and chiaroscuro. Anthony’s photo may remind the audience of the colorfly appealing yet mysterious and haunting middle class town depicted in the film Blue Velvet by David Lynch.

Anthony Presley is a powerful photographer and filmmaker who enhances attributes of theatrics and treats the art of documentary as if the artform were literally theatre. Through the identification of selective scenery found in the cities, suburbs, and rural locations of middle America as well as sophisticated lighting techniques and a brilliant composition, he reveals a grand narrative about the untold as well as unseen stories occurring within the dilapidated and vintage remnants of bygone eras throughout our landscapes. Anthony Presley’s works are sophisticated, refined, haunting, and reveal psychological impulses in regard to

how mysterious ominous environments relate to our potential for story-telling.

https://www.anthonypresley.com