RUDDY ROYE: When Living Is A Protest

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Ruddy Roye: When Living Is A Protest
Exhibition: September 16th – October 29th, 2016
Steven Kasher Gallery 515 W. 26 St., New York, NY

The world’s first solo exhibition of photographer Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye opens at Steven Kasher Gallery September 16th. The exhibition features 20 large scale photographs, many taken in Roye’s neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Roye’s images give visibility to the usually invisible members of his community. His portraits are infused with dignity and integrity. Each photograph is accompanied by a text written by the artist, often quoting the subjects. Roye spends significant time with each person he approaches, listening to their stories. For Roye, narrating the stories of his “collaborators” is as important as the images they produce together.  Roye’s is a unique voice in street photography, one full of anger, resistance and compassion.

Roye spends his days walking the streets and photographing the people he encounters. He is no stranger to walking. In 2000, Roye walked 121 miles in his native Jamaica, from Montego Bay to Kingston, photographing squatters alongside an abandoned train line. He pays close attention to the way people move through the environment, acutely aware of those that we usually ignore. He is closer to his subjects than is typical in street photography, both emotionally and physically. This intimacy is augmented by his complex compositions of colors, lights, lines, signage and symbols.

Ruddy Roye has amassed over 250,000 Instagram followers, and uploaded over 4,000 posts. He is a leading figure on Instagram among documentary photographer showcasing an interest in their communities. He began his social media work with a series of haunting posts of the devastation that followed Hurricane Sandy. For Roye, social media is a powerful outlet to get his message to a mass audience. “The media has a way of deleting the stories of people who society does not want to deal with. This is my humble way of putting these stories back in people’s faces — forming a real and active dialogue about these issues.” Online, Roye adds to each posted image an incisive retelling of the stories he has heard from his subjects. These captions will be reproduced in full for the exhibition.

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Radcliffe Roye (b. 1969) is a Jamaican photographer living and working Brooklyn. He has photographed dancehall musicians and fans, sapeurs of the Congo, the Caribbean Carnival J’ouvert and recent political protests in Ferguson, New York and Dallas. After moving to New York in 2001, Roye worked as a freelance photographer for the Associated Press. His photography has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, Ebony, Fast Company, BET and ESPN. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts; Silver Eye Center for Photography; Chastain Arts Center; the Vermont Feick Fine Arts Center; Alice Austen House and Photoville. He has held teaching positions at New York University and the School of Visual Arts and is an adjunct lecturer at Columbia University. Roye is one of the youngest members of the Kamoinge Workshop, the seminal and enduring black photography collective founded in 1963. Text above Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery

Ruddy Roye on Instagram

Ruddy Roye on L'Oeil de la Photographie

Ruddy Roye: When Living Is A Protest
Exhibition: September 16th – October 29th, 2016
Steven Kasher Gallery 515 W. 26 St., New York, NY