Lazorick, Wayner R.

American, 1939-2023

BiographyThe black-and-white nude photographs that Wayne Lazorik made in 1970s are enlivened by a sense of role-playing and a comfortable sensuality. Evoking a range of moods, from fanciful to vaguely transgressive, they appear as small mysteries or candid confrontations. In some of these photographs, young girls face the camera in casual poses that express a self-aware sexuality, while other images seem to look in on intimate rituals, involving objects like blindfolds or long white gloves. The element of fantasy becomes more prominent in Lazorik's pictures of a group of figures with painted faces gathered in a small, shadowy attic-like space. As Lazorik's colleague Van Deren-Coke wrote in the journal Creative Camerawork in 1973, "The inescabable erotic connotation conveyed by these languidly intertwined or stretched out bodies is not explict but we sense tensions generated by relationships of a private and perhaps 'forbidden' nature."

Lazorik studied photography at the University of Minnesota, completing a BS in 1962 and an MFA in 1965. In 1966, he joined the faculty of the innovative photography program at the University of New Mexico, which was emerging under Coke's direction as one of the first graduate programs to approach the medium as an art form and a means of expression. Lazorik retired from teaching in 1996.