Matt Mahurin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Matt Mahurin (born January 31, 1959, Santa Cruz, California) is an American illustrator, photographer and film director. Mahurin's illustrations appear in Time, Newsweek, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Forbes, and The New York Times.
Mahurin's work as a photo essayist has dealt with subjects such as homelessness, people with AIDS, the Texas prison system, abortion clinics, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Belfast. His extensive work directing music videos since 1986 have resulted in working with U2, Queensrÿche, Metallica, Tracy Chapman, Alice In Chains and many other popular music performers.
Photographs by Mahurin, including Clemmons Prison, Texas (1985), Texas Prison (1988), Woman's Face in Darkness (1989) and Paris (1984), are included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mahurin has a reputation for photographing himself and manipulating his own likeness in his commercial photo-illustration work. Examples of his own image appearing on magazine covers are the November 29, 2003 cover of Time, with Mahurin as Sigmund Freud, and the May 17, 2004 Time cover where Mahurin posed and photographed himself as an Abu Ghraib prisoner.
Mahurin is also credited with a notorious Time cover of O.J. Simpson, featuring an altered mugshot which removed the photograph's color saturation (perhaps inadvertently making Simpson's skin darker), burned the corners, and reduced the size of the prisoner ID number. This appeared on newsstands next to an unaltered copy on the cover of Newsweek, which occasioned some controversy over photo manipulation.
