Doug and Mike Starn, better known at the beginning of their career as 'The Starn Twins' were born in New Jersey in 1961 and took up residence in New York in the early 1980s working out of Red Hook,  an industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Having worked for over a decade in a single (but complex) idiom with silver gelatin papers and more toning and bleaching methods than you can shake a stick at, they decided to move on after the turn of the century with the series Attracted to Light - featured below (coming shortly). While borrowing much from the earlier work, it's scale and technology forced a hard look at materials and methods for the brothers - paving the way for later works using somewhat more democratic digital technologies and methods,  returning to investigations of transparency using shoji-like material with encaustic and again, large scale - resulting in works like 'Blot out the Sun' of 2004, bringing them (roughly speaking) to the place they are at now.

The hallmark of the Twins' early work is an exploration of the interruption of the pictorial plane created by the mosaic of composite sheets used to compose an entire image. Their tireless experiments with such rhythms created within the picture plane and harnessed within it's grid (Cartesian or otherwise) - are easily seen in many of their works of the period.

Much of the power of the work is derived also from the tension between the collaged elements (and it's attendant gestural activity) and the photographic representation. This is clearly visible in the work to the right,   Lisa (Blue) of 1986.