PEDRO FARIAS-NARDI: Let Me Introduce You at Photolucida

"Let me introduce you to my deceased Mother"

Photograph © Pedro Farias-Nardi

"Let me introduce you to my daughter and her husband"

Photograph © Pedro Farias-Nardi

"Let me introduce you to my Mother"

Photograph © Pedro Farias-Nardi

"This series of portraits are the result of the lingering power of the image in bringing memories to life.  I was working for an NGO (TU, MUJER) in Los Mina, Santo Domingo Este, Dominican Republic; devising a program to help the recipients of remittance to understanding their hard work overseas, thus to avoid that it is wasted in banal issues.  While visiting houses for people to talk to them, they always brought a picture of the relative that had left the country."

"For the series I placed the person holding the picture on front of a blue curtain, to resemblance a studio, but included the surroundings as a metaphor, allegory, of what is left behind, sometimes, what had been acquired from the money send: furniture, a store, emptiness –like the image of a woman holding a picture of her deceased mother (Let me introduce you to my mother…).  She was denied a visa for the funeral, and she had not the resources to bring the body back home, thus a lot of sadness, among the thins she mentioned was “who will tend to her grave there?”  Or the young girl, that can hardly hold the picture, and hardly knows her mother...." read more here

"Let me introduce you to my wife"

"A picture of myself, holding a picture of my wife; she is overseas continuing her studies in surgery" Self-Portrait © Pedro Farias-Nardi

Pedro Farias-Nardi was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1957 and started photography at the early age of seven. Focusing on long-term photographic projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, Farias-Nardi has extensively documented the lives of economically and socially marginal people. He holds degrees in anthropology from the City University of New York and the University of Florida, Gainesville, and studied photography and visual anthropology at the International Center for Photography, the University of Southern California, and with photojournalist Antonin Kratochvil. He currently lives in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. We met at Photolucida's 2015 Portfolio Review. His work is posted on FotoVisura's Guild.

From the series El Otro
Photograph © Pedro Farias-Nardi

From the series El Otro
Photograph © Pedro Farias-Nardi

Pedro Farias-Nardi’s El Otro is a series of portraits of undocumented Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. In collaboration with the Immigration Department, the portraits were taken when the Jesuit Refugee and Migrant Service (JRMS) started an ID campaign.

“My reason for these re-presentations is to call attention to the plight of these workers who are ignored by the Dominican population but are an important segment of our economy. I cooperated with the JRMS for almost two years, documenting the life of the migrants in the region.”

Check out Farias-Nardi's Otro series at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland 

NEIL SELKIRK: Certain Women : Howard Greenberg Gallery

Ruth V.  

Photograph © Neil Selkirk. All rights reserved. 

The prints are embedded in 3/4" thick slabs of 40x50" glass.

Terry E. 

Photograph © Neil Selkirk. All rights reserved. 

The prints are embedded in 3/4" thick slabs of 40x50" glass.

L'Oeil de la Photographie

edition March 18, 2015

Neil Selkirk : Certain Women at Howard Greenberg Gallery

“On the day of her portrait each of these women had a child between the ages of ten and twenty,” reads the first line in Neil Selkirk’s hand bound, limited edition book, Certain Women, the same title of his exhibition on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from March 19 – May 2, 2015. “That is the only thing you know about them. They are all anonymized. You don’t know what her name is, who she is, where she was photographed, when she was photographed.”

“Although in most cases I have spent only ten minutes or so in the presence of these women, since then I’ve been living with them off and on for twenty-five years, but quite intensely for the last five,” Selkirk tells me. “Recently I just started contacting them. Two of my favorites turned out to be related. I just called one, as she still had the same phone number. She has absolutely no recollection whatever of the event - which is exactly what I wanted. I wanted it to be inconsequential. That’s not true. I didn’t want to impose myself on the situation.” 

“The photographs were taken using an ancient 12 x 15” wooden field camera built in the late eighteen or early nineteen hundreds, modified to accept standard 11 x 14” film holders. I chose the camera in part for its massive, daunting presence, it imposed on both subject and photographer a palpable sense of gravity. I was deliberately diffident, and avoided dominating the moment, which tended to leave each subject in communion with herself, gazing, not so much into a lens, as into a mirror that offered no immediate reflection.”

Selkirk, a masterful portrait photographer, first developed the film in his darkroom in the old fashioned way. The negatives were then drum scanned and he made the prints from the resulting digital files using seven different monochrome piezographic inks that he mixed himself. The combination of the huge, luscious film negative, and the unprecedented tonal range of this archival digital printing technology has produced images of exceptional depth and radiance.

A hand bound, limited edition book containing forty-four original, individually signed prints accompanies the show.

EA: Were all of the women shot in New York?

NS: It started out in New York and then I just started going further and further afield; to the Carolina’s, Maryland, Virginia, and I went to Indiana, and eventually all the way to Montana.  Montana was essentially the end. I was there maybe a week or ten days. It was so good, there was just no point in continuing. It was twenty years I was shooting them.

EA: Why didn’t you photograph these women with their children?

NS: It’s about the women in complete remove from the children. It’s about THEM. It was random in that I photographed everybody who said yes. I asked a lot of people I knew, or ran into, did they know anyone. They would say, “I know so and so, so and so” and then I’d ask them. And it was really interesting; it just sort of spread.

Essentially I didn’t try to make anybody comfortable. I would show up at somebody’s house, obviously I’d arranged it, and I said “I want you just the way you are, nothing special” and I’d look around and decide where I’m going to take the picture. I’d say give me 20 minutes or half an hour to set the camera up and I’ll whistle when the time comes. Almost invariably that’s what happened. I would get the camera set up and find what the picture was. My philosophy has always been not to root desperately looking for the perfect place. The right place to take the picture the philosophy says is “right here, right now.”

So if you are standing outside, I’m going to do it “here”.  I’ve taken a lot of pictures and I know what the consequences of “here” are going to be. It’s very consciously not trying to find a story that I want to tell. It’s taking me as far out of the process of editorializing by use of the background as I possibly can. Obviously you’re making decisions all the time, but if you say I’m not going to go round and round and find the most perfectly lit location, I’m just going to take the picture of the woman from “here.” And then we’ll see whether they are worth looking at.

Describing the prints embedded in massive three quarter inch thick slabs of forty by fifty-inch glass, Selkirk says, “They feel great, like this exquisite thing to the touch. The mothers images are eternally suspended, as if frozen in perpetuity in amber.”

Neil Selkirk: Certain Women

March 19th to May 2nd, 2015
Howard Greenberg Gallery

41 East 57th Street, NY

http://neilselkirk.com
http://www.howardgreenberg.com

www.loeildelaphotographie.com

ALINE SMITHSON: The Interview

Arrangement in Green and Black #2

Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother © Aline Smithson 

Arrangement in Green and Black #17

Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother  © Aline Smithson  

Arrangement in Green and Black #1

Portrait of the Photographer’s Mother © Aline Smithson  

Elizabeth Avedon: What sparked the idea for your series, Arrangement in Green and Black?

Aline Smithson: The idea was sparked when I came across a small print of Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother by James McNeil Whistler at a garage sale.  Whistler has always been one of my favorite painters. Revisiting the composition again made me ponder the possibilities of using it in a photographic series. Within an hour, at two other garage sales, I happened upon a leopard coat and hat,a leopard fabric, a cat painting and a chair that was similar to the one in the painting...and I knew it was a sign to proceed.

My patient 85 year-old mother posed in over 20 ensembles, but unfortunately passed away before seeing the finished series. I am grateful for her sense of humor and the time this series allowed us to be together. 

 EA: Which of the 21 was the first?

AS: The first was the leopard coat and hat and the cat painting. I immediately loved the result and it set my imagination on fire.  I would lie awake at night thinking of combinations and scenarios. I was also working on a couple of other series at the same time. It was a period of immense creativity. 
 

Read more L'Oeil de la Photographie here
 

Fur © Aline Smithson  

Lucy with Mountains from Revisiting Beauty © Aline Smithson

As seen in the 2014 PDN Photo Annual 

I first met ALINE SMITHSON several years ago while I was a reviewer for CENTER's annual Review Santa Fe. I was impressed with all of her work using various subjects and styles. I fell in love with her mysterious black and white series, Inside/Out, and Daughter, a photographic journey from childhood to adolescent to adulthood of her daughter Charlotte; and many of her photographs incorporating her family on their yearly vacations on a lake. 

After a career as a New York Fashion Editor, working along side the greats of fashion photography, including Horst, Mario Testino, Patrick Demarchelier, Arthur Elgort, and Bert Stern, ALINE SMITHSON discovered the family Rolleiflex and never looked back. She has exhibited widely including solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Center of Fine Art Photography, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Lishui Festival in China, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Wallspace Gallery in Seattle and Santa Barbara. And her latest exhibition, Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Photographer's Mother, opened at the Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson New York last week.

Aline radiates her own personal power - she is known as a superstar among her peers. While working full-time on her own photography career, she generously promotes and supports the work of mid-career and emerging photographers daily on her award winning journal, LENSCRATCH; as well as giving workshops at the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP) and jurying exhibitions and portfolio reviews around the country. 

I spoke with Aline recently about her ongoing work projects, her upcoming exhibition and her collaboration with her mother. Read our full Interview on L'Oeil de la Photography here.

EXHIBITION
Photographs by Aline Smithson
Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Photographer's Mother
May 16 - June 22, 2014
Davis Orton Gallery
114 Warren Street Hudson, NY 12534 USA
 

Also showing:
Photographs by Meg Birnbaum, Sisters of the Commonwealth