Chasing Serendipity by Susan Hacker Stang

CHASING SERENDIPITY is a series of photographs shot with a quirky toy digital camera, the JOCO VX5. The series includes photographs taken in a number of countries and cities, and this variety of locations makes even more apparent the serendipitous connections between different places and cultures. The series is replete with numerous iconic sites and symbols, from the Empire State Building and Tower of Pisa, to Marilyn Monroe, baseball, gondolas and drive-thru wedding chapels. It is a sequence of continual visual and cultural connections, conveying a sense of uncanny coherence regarding the appearance of the world. One marvels at the serendipitous wholeness within appearances.

Susan Hacker Stang is an American photographer, author, and educator. She is professor of communications at Webster University in St. Louis. Her work has been collected by more than 20 major museums and libraries around the world and appears in numerous books and magazines. 

 

Stang's photography characteristically employs alternative cameras (such as the Olympus Pen-FT half-frame camera, the Kodak Brownie, and the Holga), or alternative techniques (such as Polaroid emulsion transfer). Recently she has been working with a JOCO VX5, the first digital toy camera according to the company that manufactures it.

She has previously published: Firenze un incontro/ Encountering Florence (Palombi Editori, Rome 2007): Kodachrome, End of the Run (Webster University Press 2011) ; and a set of notecards, Kodachrome Notes (Chronicle Books, 2012).

She received her BFA and MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design.