James Boorstein started taking pictures in the 1970s. Photography was in his blood from his father and grandfather. He trained as a cabinetmaker and sculptor before moving to New York City in 1977 where he set up a live/work loft in Chelsea. By the mid-1980s, he had mostly stopped making objects to focus on site-specific installations, searching for ways to create or enhance experience. Out of the studio, he created projects in big cities and in the middle of nowhere. In 1991 he started to draw using a camera and in 2007, he began a series which captures phenomena that could not be made in the studio. The “Video Pictures” (VPs) as they came to be called contain qualities of video and still photography. The video pictures represents a very large body of work. 55 Pictures is derived from this Video Picture series.
