BIOGRAPHY (THE SHORT VERSION)
David Ricci is a self-taught American photographer. Early in his career he became intrigued with the work of the New Topographics and New Color photographers who influenced his work for decades to come. He has produced several bodies of work that address human presence in deserted environments and reveal an underlying order in chaotic landscapes. He often employs complex visual structures and visual motifs that allow his large-scale prints to resonate with gesture, rhythm, and pattern. His current project, Hunter/Gatherer marks a major shift in process, subject matter, and presentation.
Ricci was the recipient of the Annual Curator’s Award from The Center for Photographic Arts and was longlisted for the Aesthetica Prize in the UK. His photographs have been exhibited and acquired by several museums including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Hyde Collection, Fleming Museum, DeCordova Museum, and Smith College Museum of Art among others. His monograph, EDGE, published in November, 2022 by Fall Line Press, was awarded the Gold Prize in Photography from Foreword Reviews magazine. The photographer is represented by Bernay Fine Art and Iris Gallery of Fine Art.
David lives in the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts with his wife Lori Warner.
MY STORY (A BIT LONGER)
My interest in photography began with a visit to an exhibition during my last week in graduate school at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY, just prior to receiving my master’s degree in biomedical engineering. There weren’t any specific images that struck me, rather it was the medium itself, its ability to capture a scene so precisely without requiring any manual dexterity, that piqued my interest. One year into my first engineering job I purchased a Nikon 35-mm camera and by the end of the second year the engineering world was left behind for a new career in fine art photography.
Having never attended a class on photography, art, or art history, it is fair to say my “teachers” have been the masters of 20th century photography, painting, and sculpture. Lacking any formal training, starting in my twenties (and continuing to this day), I embarked on a mission to learn and absorb as much as I could about photography by spending hundreds of hours poring over books on the histories of photography and art, reading reviews, working through Sontag, Barthes and Berger, studying countless monographs, and viewing exhibitions. The downside of not having attended art school was that I had no network to assist in career advancement, but I believe that has been outweighed by forging my own path and finding a personal approach to making photographs unfettered by a particular school of thought.
My early color work focused on architectural subjects composed in a sparse, formalist vein, trying to perfect what I understood to be “good composition”– move in close, crop tightly, eliminate superfluous objects from the field of view. These were clean, crisp, minimalist images using bold colors and a handful of geometric shapes.
Two events propelled the work in a new direction. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, after viewing a photography exhibition which was the impetus for the visit, I found myself totally engaged with paintings by Bonnard, Diebenkorn, Pollock, Estes, and others. Jackson Pollock’s wall-size “Blue Poles” totally captivated me - there was so much to take in, and my experience changed as I moved closer to or further from the painting. Given adequate time and attention, these paintings were intriguing and compelling in their intricate, effective use of color and form and, in the representational pieces, the sophisticated integration of that form with the subject matter. I did not leave the museum with a desire to be a painter nor to make photographs that mimic paintings – rather, I was inspired to make photographs that, like the paintings that drew me in at MoMA, have an intricate formal structure that supports the content.
Secondly, Sally Eauclaire’s book The New Color Photography introduced me to the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and other innovative photographers working in color in the 1970s and early 1980s. This classic work presented several novel approaches for color photography as fine art and enhanced my understanding of how lens-based images can be constructed. Shore’s work was of particular interest owing to his ability to turn an ordinary scene into an extraordinary photograph.
These new-found inspirations forged a goal: to build on the visual vocabulary developed by the New Color photographers by making photographs that, like the paintings that so intrigued me, had a more complex formal structure, employed a broad range of color palettes, and possess sustaining power – images that hold the viewer’s interest and reveal themselves over time. Ironically, despite (or because of?), this new motivation, I spent the next few years making hundreds of unsuccessful photographs. It was a struggle trying to make the types of pictures visualized in my mind using a medium in which, in the words of John Szarkowski, “form and content are defined simultaneously”.
This creative block began to crumble shortly after I started a new project in the late 1980’s photographing amusement parks, boardwalks, and outdoor sports facilities. I worked at these sites when they were being dismantled for the season or other times when few people were present. These venues call out for crowds, so when nearly deserted they have an eerie, surreal feel. I was interested in capturing human presence in people-less environments – a theme that has carried through to projects that followed. The absence of people allowed other visual elements to emerge from the scene. I stood back, included more physical space and objects in the viewfinder, and became acutely aware of the ground and sky as graphic elements. The compositions still had a geometric underpinning, but with a more complex structure that emphasized repeating visual motifs, rhythms, and patterns, and gave equal consideration to objects near and far from the lens. As the project evolved over nearly a decade, the level of visual complexity gradually increased to the point where I was orchestrating a plethora of compositional elements and nearly overloading the frame.
This body of work was honored with the Annual Curator’s Award from the Center for Photographic Arts in California in 1995. I was also named a finalist for the Ferguson Emerging Photographer Award in 1991 and a semi-finalist for the Calumet Award in 1999, both from The Friends of Photography, the California non-profit started by Ansel Adams and others to promote photography as a fine art.
Over the next two decades I continued working in a similar style, producing several bodies of work photographing a broad range of subject matter. Some common themes include human presence in abandoned spaces; finding order in random, haphazard scenes; consumerism; manmade environments in states of transition. These portfolios include, among others: a project focusing on loss and devastation that includes photographs of building demolitions, dismantled factories and natural disasters; images of scrap metal heaps and recycling centers that comment on our consumerist society; a recent project photographing commercial fishing vessels that, despite the absence of the crew, evokes their presence and the life of the working waterfront. Selections from these, and other projects are included in my monograph, EDGE, published by Fall Line Press in November, 2022. The initial funding for development of a prototype of the book was provided by the Publication Skills Grant awarded to me in 2015 by LensWork and the Luminous Landscape. Part of the funding for publication of Edge was provided by 122 backers on Kickstarter and a grant from the Martha Boschen Porter Fund, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.
For the past five years I have traveled throughout the United States working on a project titled Hunter/Gatherer. I make photographs at antique/collectible fairs, antique malls, flea markets, and other sites where memorabilia, collectibles, and nearly all imaginable consumer goods from the past are offered for sale. My initial intent for making images in this ubiquitous sliver of our cultural landscape was to make use of my signature “edge of chaos” compositional style to shine a light on American uber-materialism, to capture scenes that embody our over-consumption of material goods. But the work has taken a number of unexpected detours. I started to incorporate human and animal figures (mannequins, posters, dolls, figurines) in the images, transforming collections of lifeless articles into animated tableaux. Some of the work captured odd juxtapositions that suggested quirky, unexplainable narratives. Others pointed to gender roles from the past and alluded to current considerations of gender and identity. While mostly photographing scenes in dealer booths, I also make head shots of individual dolls and mannequins, capturing a broad range of expressions. At first, the figures included in the photographs were images of white people, but as I came across black (racist) “memorabilia,” I was startled by the stark contrast between the representations of whites (pretty, handsome, thin, successful, happy) versus the negative, degrading caricatured images of blacks. This propelled me into an unfamiliar, dark, but challenging space - making photographs that include racist objects.
The photographs in Hunter/Gatherer are grouped in five galleries on this website: Personal Effects, Enigmatic Narratives, The (Fe)Male Gaze, Doll Face and US/them (this last gallery includes disturbing images of racist objects and requires a password which can be obtained by emailing me at davidricci123@gmail.com)
Two other long-term in-progress projects continue to evolve. Images from these bodies of work will be posted to this website soon:
Where the Truth Lies: An ever-evolving image-based lexicon in which my photographs are paired with text from unwitting online collaborators. The entries include definitions and descriptions appropriated from Wikipedia that range from lighthearted to somber and touch on mythology, history, war, etymology, psychology, ecology, architecture, urban legend, science, science fiction, art, mathematics, anthropology, agriculture and more. By selecting a specific caption to accompany the image and/or presenting the image with other “unrelated” photographs, the context of the picture is controlled, and its meaning re-directed. These juxtapositions of image and text ask us to consider how we obtain meaning from photographs and their tenuous, fragile intimacy with the truth.
Grids & Series: This portfolio includes prints of multiple images arranged in arrays that can be viewed both sequentially and simultaneously. In 2014 my grid titled “Which Winch” was longlisted for the Aesthetica Prize in the United Kingdom and was awarded the top purchase prize at the Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region exhibition where it was acquired by The Hyde Collection.
Nearly all the photographs through 2013 have been shot on medium format film, though a few have been on 4×5″ film. I now capture images digitally. Many of the pieces have a high level of visual density so the exhibition prints are often quite large – typically 48×60”.