Daniel Gordon (born 1980) is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He belongs to a generation of image-makers who treat the camera less as a window onto the world than as a device for recording things that did not previously exist. Where a documentary photographer goes out to find a subject, Gordon builds one first, out of printed pictures and paper, and only then photographs it. This reversal — construction before exposure — is the hinge on which his whole practice turns.

His visual language is immediately recognisable: saturated colour, compressed and slightly unstable space, and forms that seem to hover between two and three dimensions. The raw material is photographic — images culled from magazines, catalogues, packaging and the internet — which he prints, cuts, crushes, tapes and layers into physical objects. Fruits, flowers, vases, faces and bodies are assembled as paper sculptures and then re-photographed, so that the final print is simultaneously a document of a real object and an obvious fabrication. Edges of cut paper, seams, wrinkles and tape remain visible, deliberately refusing the seamlessness of digital compositing even as the pictures borrow its brightness.

Across his career he has returned repeatedly to a few enduring subjects: the still life, especially arrangements of fruit and flowers; the portrait, in which sitters are reconstituted from fragments of other photographs; and larger studio tableaux in which human figures, props and backgrounds are all made from the same printed material. What distinguishes these works from the collage tradition is that nothing is pasted flat onto a surface. The collage happens in three-dimensional space, in front of the lens, so the camera is not a neutral recorder but the final stage of the making process. The result occupies an awkward, productive place between photography, sculpture and painting, and it invites the viewer to keep asking what is being depicted and what is merely printed.

Critically, Gordon’s work is often discussed in relation to the Pictures Generation and to later artists who work with appropriation and digital image culture, though his method differs from theirs in its insistence on physical craft and studio labour. Where appropriation art recycles existing images as images, he converts them back into matter and then re-photographs it. This makes his pictures unusually revealing about how photographs circulate: as cheap, disposable, endlessly reproducible surfaces that can nevertheless be handled, torn and rebuilt. His teaching and his presence in the contemporary photography conversation have kept that question — what a photograph is made of — alive for a younger generation of artists.

For collectors of photobooks and contemporary photography, Gordon’s work rewards close physical attention. Because the subject is literally paper, the printed page is an unusually sympathetic home for it; the grain of the reproduction, the weight of the stock and the sequencing of images can either amplify or flatten the tension between flatness and volume that drives the work. It is worth looking at how individual pictures are cropped and paired, since his arrangements depend on adjacency and colour rhythm rather than on single heroic images. A useful entry point is to follow the still lifes first, then the portraits, and to notice how the same construction logic scales up from a domestic tabletop to a full studio set.

Aperture’s catalogue page for Daniel Gordon’s Still Life documents the artist’s monograph from the photography publisher, presenting a body of colour still-life pictures made from collaged paper, printed imagery and studio-built forms that he assembles and then photographs. Publishing the work as a sustained sequence clarifies what distinguishes the series: rather than photographing found reality, Gordon photographs a temporary sculpture he has made, so the print is evidence of a physical event. It is the most widely distributed gathering of this central strand of his work and a standard reference for it.

An editorial interview with Daniel Gordon published by Interview, in which the photographer speaks about the making of his collage-based images: the sourcing of printed and digital material, the building of objects in the studio, and the decision to photograph those objects rather than assemble a picture on a screen. First-person accounts of this kind are valuable because the work’s meaning depends on the labour and improvisation behind the finished print, and the magazine is an established editorial venue rather than a promotional listing.

The Museum of Modern Art’s online presentation of New Photography 2010 documents Daniel Gordon’s inclusion in the museum’s recurring survey of recent photographic work. His contribution centred on large colour photographs of three-dimensional tableaux that he builds by hand out of printed and screen-sourced images and then re-photographs, so the finished picture records a physical, constructed object rather than a digital composite. MoMA’s selection placed this method inside a period conversation about photographic authorship in an image-saturated culture, and this exhibition remains the showing most often cited when his practice is introduced.

The New York Times topic page collects the paper’s coverage relating to Daniel Gordon, gathering reviews, profiles and exhibition notices in one index. As a record of press reception it shows how consistently his work has been discussed in the mainstream art and photography pages over successive exhibitions and publications, and it provides dated, editorially vetted documentation that can be used to corroborate claims made elsewhere. It is useful precisely because it is an index of secondary literature rather than a single promotional text.