Samaras participated in Kaprow's "Happenings," and posed for Segal's plaster sculptures.[3]Claes Oldenburg, in whose Happenings he also participated, later referred to Samaras as one of the "New Jersey school," which also included Kaprow, Segal, George Brecht, Robert Whitman, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks, and Roy Lichtenstein. Samaras previously worked in painting, sculpture, and performance art, before beginning work in photography.
He subsequently constructed room environments that contained elements from his own personal history.[4] His "Auto-Interviews" were a series of text works that were "self-investigatory" interviews.[5] The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He worked with multi-mediacollages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls "Photo-Transformations". Of the diverse nature and output of his body of work New York Times arts journalist Grace Glueck said in 1996 that "There appears to be not one Lucas Samaras, but several artists of that name”.[6]
^"Archived copy"(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on 2011-09-27. Retrieved 2011-04-27.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) Stone, Nick. Chuck Close: Lucas (press release). Retrieved 4-27-2011.
Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, editors. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings. University of California Press, 1996.
Jo Applin, '"Materialized Secrets": Samaras, Hesse and the Small Scale Box', Object, no. 4, 2002
Further reading
Goysdotter, Moa (2013). Impure Vision: American Staged Art Photography of the 1970s. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. ISBN9789187351006.