Biography

Born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1982, Tyler Shields is a contemporary artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, nicknamed “Hollywood’s Favorite Photographer”.

Tyler Shields has evolved from the “bad boy of photography” to an artist at the forefront of his artistic medium by producing images that play on notions of gaze, power structures, hyperrealism. Through his iconoclastic style and his film practice, Tyler Shields captures a new vision of American life.

As an artist who has worked with a number of Hollywood personalities, Shields’ work has much more to do with his controlled fabrication of subconscious images, in the vein of Caravaggio’s almost photographic paintings of the 16th century. Where the rules and guidelines of the century were abandoned and reintegrated to challenge the sensibilities of the time.

Shields’ work is not about celebrity, but about colleagues and friends in his social sphere who want to make art and who share an obsession to create. He attempts to move through the complexities and layers of the “celebrity” sphere, in an intrinsically tangible view of portraiture and its meaning and context in a shifting landscape of identities that is accumulating in what we call the 21st century. What does it take for an image to catch the attention through the deep gaze of time and the ever-increasing attention to the platform of the contemporary art space, now, tomorrow, and a thousand days from today, or a thousand “Likes” from now?