Man of Mystery

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here is a memorable scene in the The Pianist, when Wladyslaw Szpilman asks his friend in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance if he could join them, and the buddy quips back, “"Wladek, you musicians don't make good conspirators. You're too... too... musical!” Stereotypes are often true, especially when it comes to artists being more inward than most—with serious deficiencies in the self-promotion department. Van Gogh experimented with getting his name out there. He did find posthumous fame, but he lost three quarters of an ear in the process.  

But Gordon Stettinius, a Virginia-based photographer, demonstrated recently that boldness is not always lost on artists intent on announcing their presence loudly to the world’s aesthetes, and that there is no limit to which a guy will go to leave an impression.

Five years ago, the adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond started an ambitious campaign to distinguish himself as a guy bursting at the seams with moxy. He took a series of photographs of himself in which he donned the guises of nearly three dozen bizarre characters. He sent these photos to humorless industry professionals whom he’s either called on or worked with in the past, with the intention of leaving each of them with a lasting impression.  

With studio photographer and co-conspirator Terry Brown, Stettinius created the Margini Studio series in which Stettinius appears with different hair (growing mullets, cutting bangs, and shaving artificial bald spots) wearing a host of outdated clothes, and in some cases experimenting with gender-bending "looks."  

The different personas have consisted of: a punk rocker, squeaky clean Republican governor, a skinhead, Hasidic Jew (side curls, beard and all), a convict, a '60s era prom queen with an authentic bouffant hairdo, Billy Ray Cyrus’ doppelganger, and much more. Accompanying the photos are personalized letters, as if written by the characters themselves.  

Whether or not Stettinius has made a friend in the many recipients of his photos is another story.