If Only The Borg Were This Nice To Look At.
by Bob Findle

Don Sabin, a Los Angeles-based photographer, says he has always liked fantasy and a good science fiction movie. Maybe that explains why some of the computer-altered pictures in his collection, Figurations, look like circuit panels or even Star Trek emotionless meanies The Borg.
“I don’t really have any high concept for the images,” Sabin says. “I like to play with images and the industrial and dark look is one that I like. It sort of bugs me when people talk endlessly about their concepts. I like to leave it up to the viewer to get out of the images what they can. My work has always been about the imagery without any explanation to take away from the viewer’s experience.”

Sabin says he feels as soon as an artist announces what he wants to convey, that plants the idea in the viewer’s head and colors their perception.

“I think the viewer should be free to see whatever they want,” he comments.

To create the images, Sabin starts with traditional shots of nude males.

“Then comes the computer,” he says. “Everything in photography today is high tech and you can take an image and do pretty much whatever you want to it. I enjoy twisting and corrupting the images into fantasy.”

It is particularly fun, he says, when he gets to show the models the images after he is done altering them.

“They often find it fascinating, how different their body looks, how the colors work,” Sabin says. “They usually want to know what I was trying to achieve. I always ask them what they think was achieved.”

Sabin’s traditional work such as portraits, landscapes and architecture can be found at http://home.comcast.net/~donsaban/index.htm