Contemporary Portraiture with Doug DuBois and Richard Renaldi
Panel Discussion coordinated by Aperture, moderated by Lesley A. Martin
Thursday, May 7, 2009
7 West 34th Street
New York, New York
In conjunction with the Affordable Art Fair
Lesley A. Martin, Publisher of Aperture’s book program, will present artists Doug DuBois and Richard Renaldi, who will speak about their respective bodies of work and how they fit into the broader context of portraiture in contemporary photography.
Doug DuBois: All the Days and Nights (Aperture, 2009) resonates with emotional immediacy, offering a potent examination of family relations and what it means to subject personal relationships to the unblinking eye of the camera. Doug DuBois began photographing his family in 1984, prior to his father’s near-fatal fall from a commuter train and his mother’s subsequent breakdown and hospitalizations. More than twenty years later, DuBois’s project has developed in remarkable ways. Each photograph is rich with color, nuanced gestures and glances enveloping the viewer in a multivalent, emotionally tense world.
Richard Renaldi is a photographer in search of the brief encounter—that fleeting moment when a stranger opens his life to him and, consequently, to the viewer. His trust in the descriptive and empathic abilities of the camera verges on that of his nineteenth–and early-twentieth-century predecessors. His first monograph, Figure and Ground (Aperture, 2006), presents portraits and landscapes taken from coast to coast, across the United States. They form a collective portrait of a population and nation going through a process of diversification that has already dramatically enlarged the notion of what defines Middle America. In Renaldi’s second monograph, Fall River Boys (Charles Lane Press, 2009), an extraordinary body of images—both portraits and landscapes—is gathered for the first time. The resulting photographs, made over the course of nine years, are not brief encounters. Renaldi’s quiet gaze considers his subjects with neither judgment nor irony. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a city where young men grow into manhood surrounded by a landscape of idyllic natural beauty, frayed at the margins by darkened relics of an industrial past.