Arnie's
first body of photographic work was created in Amsterdam, Binghamton,
and San Francisco in the early 1970s. Without this biographical
knowledge, one might look at the work and assume it was made years
earlier, for these early prints have the character and patina
of turn-of-the-century high pictorialism rather than the edgy
minimalism, inflected pop iconography, or overt political content
that defined American art in the late 60s and early 70s.
In
spite of Zane's apparent knowledge of the basic styles of contemporary
art -- he was an art history major in college after all -- his
first photographs seem widely divergent from contemporary concerns.
They derive from two seemly contradictory imperatives that would
continue to define his life and art: a pictorial, romantic aesthetic
that resonates with his personality, sensibility, and socio-political
experience as a gay man; and, equally compelling, an abiding concern
with gesture, accident, and process that pushed him to constantly
explore the primary operations of seriality and repetitive structures.
