RICHARD RENALDI – MANHATTAN SUNDAY

Posted on 2016-11-21

Manhattan Sunday is a photographic diary from 2010 to the present. As the name suggests, the pictures were all taken in Manhattan, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, usually after a night out on the town. If hedonism informs these images, from the bare skin and muscled bodies in many of its portraits, to the disco balls and bottles of poppers in its still lifes, it’s a sensuality tempered by reflection. The faces are blissed out, maybe even a bit wan after eight or ten hours of clubbing. Black and white lends a coolness to the scenes, merging day with night, while several long exposures capture the euphoria of the club experience, but also its transience.

“It was in these serene moments,” Renaldi writes, “leaving the clubs, totally spent, that a new city revealed itself to me.” Renaldi is renowned for his portraits, most prominently in the acclaimed series Touching Strangers, which communicates a rich sense of its subjects’ inner lives in just a few almost unnoticeable details. That same nuance is on display here, whether it’s the Offer Nissim ball cap that shades the eyes of a wasp-waisted young man whose T-shirt dangles from his pants, or the feminine curl of a single dark lock snaking across the clipped chest hair of a set of sculpted pecs. Yet it’s New York that lends these portraits their unique resonance—Manhattan, represented here in a large quadtych of the borough’s ever more crowded skyline, in which thousands of lights blaze from hundreds of buildings, simultaneously evocative and anonymous.

Opposite – 7:35

Exhibition runs through to December 23rd, 2016

Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor
New York
NY 10022

www.benrubigallery.com

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THOMAS ROMA – THE PLATO’S DOGS TRILOGY

Posted on 2016-11-21

This exhibition includes 80 black and white photographs and from three different series, which together serve as a biography of Roma’s Brooklyn. In the Plato’s Dogs photographs, dog shadows take on mythic status. In Higher Ground, shot on the elevated trains that run through the heart of Brooklyn, Roma captures the pockets of in-between-time that fill the lives of commuters. The photographs from The Waters of Our Time, are the most self-reflective of the three bodies of work. The Waters series is deeply personal and spans Roma’s entire career, beginning with a photograph from his first roll of film in 1972. The images are intimate tokens of Roma’s life that feature his wife, son, neighbors and home in Brooklyn. The exhibition launches the publication of the monograph Plato’s Dogs by powerHouse Books.

Reminscent of cave paintings, the distorted and featureless silhouettes in Plato’s Dogs capture the primitive essence of the animal. Printed life-size, the shadows more resemble a mythical beast than man’s best friend. Taken between 2011-2013 in a dog park in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, Roma describes them as “landscapes with shadows.” Often Roma would look first to the ground, locating a spot composed of roots, patches of trampled grass, rocks and debris. Roma would stick to that spot and try to lure the dogs over to him. A highly creative technical engineer who builds all of his own camera equipment, Roma faced the challenge of how to prevent his shadow from showing up in each frame. He purchased an eight-foot painter’s extension pole. He mounted his camera to the pole and connected an extra long cable release to activate the shutter. As Giancarlo Roma writes in the books’ introduction, Armed with this contraption he alternately looked like a shepherd leading his flock with the pole as his staff, and a madman chasing the dogs around with some sort of homing device.”

Exhibition runs through to December 23rd, 2016

Steven Kasher Gallery
521 West 23rd Street
New York
NY 10011

www.stevenkasher.com

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